Tag Archives: history

Toxic Religion and Politics

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 I Wish I Were a Lily Pad

In times like this, I wish I were a Lily pad.  Lily pads don’t make stuff up. They know nothing of nations, politics, or religion. Nothing about the reckless ambition of the “Seven Mountain Mandate” or the New Apostolic Reformation to turn the USA into a Christian nation.

picture of Lily pads

There are no mountains or mandates here on the wetland pond. No illusions of grandeur. No deceit. No presumption of superiority. No striving for dominion over the cattails, Trumpeter Swans, red-wing blackbirds, muskrats, and beavers.

Aesthetic appreciation and science tell me that the Lily pads are in trouble. Monet painted water lilies a century before toxic run-off from the fields began to poison the lilies and the ponds themselves. The wetland pond by the A-frame cabin is smaller and shallower than it was six years ago. I wonder how long before it’s gone.

No Greatness without Goodness

The intersection of religion and politics is my thing; it’s the place where I live. So is history. American presidents, generals, and diplomats have attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville two sentences about America’s “genius and power” and its goodness and greatness.

Not until I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. — attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville.

If Tocqueville were visiting America in 2024, he would find his second sentence has already happened.  As for the first sentence? Instead of churches and pulpits that were “the secret of [America’s] genius and power,” Tocqueville might find himself in churches where the only thing left is the toxic myth of religious and national exceptionalism. He would find pulpits aflame with the fire of the Seven Mountain Mandate — the road map to Christian dominion over the seven mountains of American life: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government. The theology is Dominionism. Its politics are nationalist. The combination is toxic.

Anxiety and fear are linked, but they are not the same.

To be mortal is to be anxious. Anxiety looks for a foothold, i.e, a secure footing that will not change, crumble, or allow your feet to slip. During the Third Reich, National Socialism turned anxiety into fear. The targets of fear and hate were specific. Jews, Gypsies, “homosexuals,” etc. became the ‘deviants’ whose elimination was necessary for restoring a pure Aryan race and culture. Conformity, obedience, nationalism, and racial supremacy left no room for nonconformists, critics, dissenters, and deviants. This video tells the story of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s radio rebuke of Adolf Hitler’s radio address two days before.

Toxic Greatness

The German Church did not dissent. It saw no problem genuflecting on Sundays while saluting Hitler seven days a week. Except for the small “Confessing Church” movement and its “Declaration of Barmen,” Christians across Germany showed no sign of cognitive dissonance in professing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior while practicing obedience to Hitler and German nationalism.  Jews were Christ killers, Gypsies were weird, and “homosexuals” were ‘vermin’. The Church joined the movement to “make Deutschland great again.”

When, after the end of WWII, Albert Einstein spoke respectfully of the Church, he was not speaking of the churches that bent the knee to German nationalism. He was speaking of the Confessing Church of Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller.

photo of Albert Einstein

“Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I am forced to confess that what I once despised. I now praise unreservedly.“

Two Roads Diverging

The American Church of 2024 is divided between those Tocqueville, Niemöller, Bonhoeffer, and Einstein might find reason to praise, and the churches that would make them weep. 

Two roads diverge again this year. If we take the road of the Seven Mountain Mandate, we will look back on the road not taken with more than a sigh.

Gordon C. Stewart, Presbyterian Minister, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017 Wipf and Stock), Brooklyn Park, MN, Oct. 23, 2024.

Ivana Knew: The Seeds of Disrespect

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This 2020 commentary has stayed hidden in Views' draft file for reasons perhaps as obvious as the reasons for posting it now.

Every deed in the grand manner on this earth will in general be the fulfillment of a desire which had long since been present in millions of people, a longing silently harbored by many. Yes, it can come about that centuries wish and yearn for the solution of a certain question, because they are sighing beneath the intolerable burden of an existing condition and the fulfillment of this general longing does not materialize.

These words are not Donald Trump’s. “The intolerable burden that yearns for a solution” did not refer to the continuing dispossession of America’s First People, or the descendants of men, women children whose labor produced the wealth of their white kidnappers.

They are the words of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, the book Ivana Trump said her husband kept in his bedroom.

Nations which no longer find any heroic solution for such distress can be designated as impotent, while we see the vitality of a people, and the predestination for life guaranteed by this vitality, most strikingly demonstrated when, for a people’s liberation from a great oppression, or for the elimination of a bitter distress, or for the satisfaction of its soul, restless because it has grown insecure – Fate some day bestows upon it the man endowed for this purpose, who finally brings the long yearned-for fulfillment.

Adolf Hitler, Chapter 8, The Strong Man Is Mightier Alone, Mein Kamp

A Man Endowed for this Purpose: To Save the Nation

The president is a moral predator who feeds on fear of “the other.” Predators show no respect or compassion. Not for the sick and dying during the new coronavirus pandemic. Not for African Americans disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Not for at-risk first responders: doctors, nurses, orderlies, and hospital custodians and kitchen staffs begging for more masks and ventilators. Not for journalists who bring facts to disinformation press conferences. They show no respect for anyone or anything and hold nothing as sacred. They pose with Bibles in front of churches, but never read them.

Is it unreasonable to suppose that a president at risk of losing his fight to keep his tax returns from public scrutiny, fearful of losing his bid for re-election in November, and facing multiple criminal charges after leaving office would use the playbooks his first ex-wife and ghost writer alleged to have been by his bedside?

Hermann Goebbels, Minister without Portfolio
Photos of Hermann Goebbels, Joseph Goring (Third Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), and Ernst Rohm (SA co-founder and Chief of Staff)
Joseph Göring, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
Ernst Röhm, SA co-founder and Chief of Staff

The Supreme Judge of the ________People

As news of the covert operation began to leak, Reich “Minister Without Portfolio” Joseph Göring ordered police stations to burn “all documents concerning the action of the past two days.” Newspapers were told not to publish the names of the dead. Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goring took to the airwaves to announce to the nation that Hitler had prevented traitors from overthrowing the government and throwing the country into turmoil. Eleven days later (July 13, 1934) Hitler gave the nationally broadcast speech to the Reichstag (the German equivalent of the U.S. Congress) in which he conflated the nation and himself. The strong man who made Germany great again proclaimed himself “the Supreme Judge of the German people” and threatened opponents as traitors.

If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this. In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason, and I further gave the order to cauterise down to the raw flesh the ulcers of this poisoning of the wells in our domestic life. Let the nation know that its existence—which depends on its internal order and security—cannot be threatened with impunity by anyone! And let it be known for all time to come that if anyone raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot.

Adolf Hitler speech to the Reichstag, July 13, 1934.

Concerned with potential objection from the Reichstag and the courts, Hitler acted quickly to push official approval by the Reichstag the expansion of his powers. The change was approved immediately and retroactively, serving as official justification for the massacre of the Night of the Long Knives. On July 3rd his administration’s cabinet approve a measure that declared, “The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defense by the State.”

The Blossoms of Disrespect

Had journalists asked former civil rights and peacemaking activist William Sloane Coffin what he would say about the self-proclaiming law-and-order U.S. president and his loyal partisans in Congress, I imagine he might repeat what he said years ago of public figures who insist their language bears no responsibility for hate and violence.

“Trent Lott, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell– all insist their words contribute nothing to an atmosphere that might legitimate anti-gay violence. Don’t they know that the seed of disrespect often blossoms into hatred?”

William Sloane Coffin Jr., Credo (WJK)

All who seek a respectful future do well to remember how quickly good gets twisted into evil, and how even a society’s best intentions for a just society can fall prey to the law of unintended consequences: the end of a Constitutional democratic republic by little men with little mustaches and deranged men with orange hair.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, July 8, 2020.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

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A month in America’s oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida, makes clear that history is a strange thing. History is the past, but it’s also the telling of it, the renderings of it. The English language does not distinguish between the two – the past as it was – and the past as remembered and interpreted. Only the interpreted past is available to us.

Historians distinguish between the two with the word ‘history’ (the past) and ‘historiography’, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the study of historical writings or the writing of history”.

Example of ACCORD Freedom Trail plaques

Example of ACCORD Freedom Trail plaques

Most interesting during our one-month stay in St. Augustine were the different historiographies of the Civil Rights Movement.

Tourists in St. Augustine walk past homes and churches with plaques like this one that tell the story of the brave civil rights history of the ’50s and ’60s on what’s called The Freedom Trail.

The casual tourist is unlikely to notice that the Freedom Trail story is not the only one in town. There are two different sets of plaques. The groups that wrote and erected them represent different, often competing, historiographies.

The more prominent set of plaques the define The Freedom Trail were created by ACCORD.  They highlight the role of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The other is the project of a group of local citizens led by the Eubanks family, whose father, the Rev. Goldie M. Eubanks, Sr, was Vice President of the St. Augustine Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose work predated and continued after the arrival of Dr. King and the SCLC in St. Augustine.

The NAACP is the oldest civil rights organization in America. In the 1950s and ’60s, many civil rights leaders came to regard it as too passive, too conservative. The word ‘Colored’ in its name labelled it as out of touch with Back pride.  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) arose as a bolder, more activist organization, although the the SCLC and the NAACP represented by Dr. King and Roy Wilkins, respectively, worked closely together. To the left of SCLC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), arrived on the national scene.

While in St. Augustine, we lived next door to a home on The Freedom Trail identified by ACCORD as important to the Movement in St. Augustine. Some of the men who gathered there every mid-morning until dark seem to identify with Dr. King and the SCLC. Others seem resentful that Dr. King and the SCLC got the praise for the work of Rev. Eubanks, Rev. Thomas, and Dr. Robert Hayling, a courageous local dentist, who paved the way for national media attention to the plight in St. Augustine. The historiography of the latter group is posted on the alternative plaques that focus more on the indigenous leaders who put their lives on the line every day as citizens of St. Augustine.

History and historiography are like that. The four Gospels of the New Testament look at the same time period and events with different memories and different angles on the Jesus story.  The nature of history is that it always leaves itself to interpretation. And the nature of historiography is that it raises the question of the story-teller’s angle.

In light of Dr. King’s later speeches about the intrinsic connection between capitalism, the War in Vietnam, and militarism, it seems a great paradox that it was the Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of the largest Department of Defense contractors, that funded the ACCORD project centered on Dr. King. History and historiography are always strange. Always they involve some concoction of our better selves, self-interest, pride, and sometimes, a heavy dose of irony.

Dr. Mahmoud El-Kati talks of racism and mesmerizes students at South

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Click on: Dr. Mahmoud El-Kati talks of racism and mesmerizes students at South. This man is a legend in his own time Minnesota. He deserves all the air time the world will give him. He has spoken at Shepherd of the Hill Church‘s First Tuesday Dialogues on the historical roots of the colony at Jamestown, and is a highly esteemed colleague and friend.