Jerry, Jr. vs Jesus

So it wasn't just Lindsay Graham leading the charge on the right to allow Trump to seamlessly rid himself of Jeff Sessions with no noisy consequences from the base. Jerry Falwell had a son, Jerry, Jr., and some people bill him as "a top conservative religious leader." On Monday, Jr. urged-- in a display of raw religious-power politics, born no doubt from a feeling of impending doom, a realization that they’ve doubled down on the wrong side of history-- Señor Trump to fire Jeff Sessions over failure to protect Trump from his role in Putin-Gate. Claiming Sessions has lost evangelicals' support, he said "He really is not on the president’s team, never was. He’s wanted to be attorney general for many, many years. I have a feeling he took a gamble and supported the president because he knew he would reward loyalty." WOW!

In forsaking Sessions, faith leaders are turning on one of their own, a man who for decades fought in the political trenches for conservative Christian causes. As a senator from Alabama, Sessions was one of the first Republicans to endorse Trump’s long-shot presidential campaign, taking heat from his party in return.

...During an Aug. 8 speech, the attorney general received a standing ovation from faith leaders after he praised the Trump administration's record.

"The people of this nation are still the most religious nation in the developed world. Yet people of faith are facing a new hostility. Really, a bigoted ideology which is founded on animus towards people of faith," Sessions told the assembly at Alliance Defending Freedom.

"Fortunately, President Donald Trump has heard these concerns," Sessions said. "He made a promise-- and from Day One of this administration he has delivered. He is defending religious freedom at home and abroad."

As a community, evangelicals have been willing to overlook what they see as the president’s personal shortcomings-- including payoffs to women during the 2016 campaign who said they had previously had affairs with Trump-- in return for his attention. Vice President Mike Pence has hosted a series of dinners at his home for faith leaders.

On Monday afternoon, faith leaders met with White House officials in a series of meetings on immigration, prison reform and abortion.

Falwell said Sessions lost the group’s loyalty “a long time ago" and has not stopped the Justice Department from going after Trump's allies. Last week, the president’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted of fraud and his onetime lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations.

“A lot of Republicans pretend to be friends to conservatives and the faith community for decades when they really were not,” Falwell said. “I don’t know if he’s in that category. If he was really a fair person, he’d be going after both sides.”

This morning Frank Schaeffer posed the question, "Why do evangelicals support whatever Trump comes up with next-- even when he turns on one of their own as he's now turned on the evangelical Jeff Sessions?"  Luckily, since he knows that community better than most, he also answered it. "Because evangelicalism isn’t about facts, let alone true spirituality. It’s a made up political reality based not on logic but theological methodology. What is theological methodology? It is a belief systemall of which must be wholeheartedly accepted for any of it to work. Question anything theological as you would-- say-- something ordinary like traffic directions to a post office and it falls apart. There is no post office as it were, just a post office feeling that must be sustained at all costs by everything but facts. Trump has been folded into this sort of theology-based 'reality.' He can’t be logically defended any more than the resurrection can. He merely must be accepted as an inevitable manifestation of God’s will in a faux born-again type political experience of a theological, not logical, kind. People who didn’t grow up in the evangelical bubble don’t realize what they’re demanding when they ask an evangelical to accept simple facts as true: say, that Trump is a lying fraud. The white evangelical brain is deaf, blind and dumb to reality given its cradle to grave conditioning. Once theological thinking is the issue then of course just as the Bible is 'inspired' so too must Trump's lies be true, be they about himself of Jeff Sessions."

I hope you will recall our Vote Common Good friend Samir Selmanović from Monday. At the time he wrote that "in its endorsement of Trump, the most organized, outspoken, and influential religious group in America, Evangelical Christians, have essentially abandoned its most prized and potent capacity: faith. That was the very high price of Trump. Jesus' teaching is that the world is a safe place to be and do good-- and that his followers, having faith in the power of God, do not need to resort to lying, excluding, and immorality to advantage themselves. Jesus-followers and admirers are invited to live, love, and lead in truth and grace. By contrast, organized Evangelicalism has now opted for the opposite of faith: fear. Leaving their faith in God behind, they have now embraced fear of immigrants, fear of the poor, and fear of liberals. This new creed has, incredibly, abandoned the teachings of Jesus as naive and impotent. The greatest irony of American Evangelicalism today is that it has given up on God's presence in the world and chosen an anti-Jesus criminal as its protector. Evangelicals essentially elected a modern-day Barabbas, thus crucifying their former Lord again. Instead of living the liberating faith of Jesus, they are now living in the confining siege mentality of Trump. Living by faith has given way to living in fear."

This morning, Samir and I talked about this Jerry, Jr. thing and he discussed it in terms of how religious groups abandon their founding values and how it is the Evangelicals who are showing the way. "First, religious groups do well by serving the world and thus gain legitimate power. Then they want more power, without corresponding service to their non-adherents. When they don't get the power, they morph from being heroes into seeing themselves as victims. Victim identity further weakens them from within by taking them further and further from their vision of possibility in the world."

Eventually, they pay attention only to what scares them and to the weaknesses of the Other (which becomes everyone else—and increasingly hostile), and thus they begin to lose their grip on reality. That's where we are now: They control the Presidency, the House, the Senate, prospectively the Judiciary, and the majority of Statehouses--and still feel oppressed!

The last and long stage of dying from within starts when they circle the wagons and make loyalty to powerful protectors paramount. They would take Trump over Jesus, any time.. Jesus is about possibility and progress in the world and love for the Other, Trump is about power in the world and fear of the Other. Nothing can now stop them from operating from deep-seated fear since they have now created circumstances that naturally make them afraid ("everyone hates them") and have destroyed their own resources (the integrity and validity of their own theology and ethics). They thus swiftly remove their own people at any whiff of disloyalty, such as Jeff Sessions They project this motivation as a virtue to their own: "Great leadership requires hard decisions, often sacrifice and suffering!” (Always, of course, sacrifice and suffering by the disloyal and never by the leaders who stay.)

But, most importantly, and something that will become increasingly obvious to them and to everyone very soon, once they lose touch with reality they also lose touch with what I would call The Future: the inevitable resisters, defectors, and new visionaries from within, all streaming out of the compound (with their heads, hearts, and/or feet) and looking to build new reality around a new fire. When such fearful groups disintegrate, it is always a self-fullfiling prophecy: They fear they will fall apart and that very fear makes them fall apart. It is inevitable, like clockwork, historically speaking. It begins invisibly and gently from within, and by the time they finally notice it, it's a big surprise to them. Please reference the story below (something I use with corporate folks but is applicable here).

What is Vote Common Good about? We are about The Future. We will find the disillusioned, reality-seeking ones, support their founding values and original faith, show them they are never alone, and conspire Common Good with them. (The future of Christianity is blue and green, with a touch of red.)

TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO
by Samir Selmanović
WisdomWorkRoom

I don’t know whether this story really happened.

But I know it is true.

Ten thousand years ago, there was a tribe that lived around a fire. Fire was their source of heat, light, and comfort.

The first ring of people around the fire, those closest to it, were elderly and children. Every night, the tribe would listen to the stories of the elderly and watch the children dance.

The second ring around the fire was occupied by wood gatherers. The tribe held wood gatherers in honor. Wood gathering was a difficult and a never-ending task.

The third and final outer ring of the tribe were the hunters and warriors. The tribe was in awe of their skill and bravery. With them, the tribe was fed and safe.

One day, the wood gatherers said, “We want to be closest to the fire. Without us there would be no fire.” The tribe leaders met, pondered, and decided to make it so. They all new, without the wood gatherers, there would be no fire.

After this, there were less stories from the elderly and less dancing from the children.

Not long after that, the hunters and warriors of the tribe said, “We want to be the closest to the fire. Without us there would be no tribe.”  The council of the tribe met again, pondered, and decided to make it so. They all new, without hunters and warriors there would be no tribe.

At this point, the stories from the elderly and dancing by the children all but vanished.

After couple of years, one clear sky summer night, an elderly woman stood up, walked through the crowd to the fire, took a piece of burning wood and carried it to the outskirts of the tribe. She set down the fire that she was carrying and began to tell a story. Then the first child came.