Gearing Up For The 2018 GOP War Against Christ (And Christmas)

I see Trump like this (above). And I can't believe not everyone else does. But Republicans-- especially of the evangelical brand-- have a very distorted idea of him... like this:

Or for the non-snake handler variety, maybe like this:

John Pavlovitz has a good weekend message up on Stuff That Needs To Be Said, his blog: Yes, There is a War on Christmas.

The Evangelicals were right.
The pulpit-pounding preachers were right.
Franklin Graham was right.
The Republicans were right.
Donald Trump was right.
 Fox News was right.

The Religious Right was right.
Every single one of them was speaking gospel truth.

...They told me Christianity was under attack here. It is.
They told me Jesus was being rejected. He is.
They told me a brazen mockery was being made of his birth. It is.
They told me the Gospels were being perverted. They are.
They told me decent people were being deceived. They are.

They only thing they neglected to tell me in their bombastic, sanctimonious, sky-is-falling sermonizing—was the source of the offensive.

The brutal yuletide assaults haven’t come from Atheists or Agnostics, not from Humanists or Muslims, not from coffee franchises or the Liberal Media or Progressive Christians.

The very white Conservatives who’ve been loudly sounding the alarm, are the incessantly advancing hordes.

They’re the only ones warring with Christmas, because they’ve forgotten their own story.

Christmas, is a child of Palestinian parents desperately fleeing politically ordered genocide.

Christmas is a dark-skinned refugee, born amid the smell of damp straw and animal dung, because no human-worthy welcome could be found.

Christmas is a poor, itinerant, street preaching Jewish rabbi, living off the generosity of those around him.

Christmas is a compassionate caregiver, feeding and clothing and healing whoever crossed his path.

Christmas is a liberal activist fighting for the poor, condemning violence, shunning material wealth, and calling the world to live sacrificially for the common good.

The white Evangelical Church in America in 2018 has no use for this Christmas. In fact, worse than that-- it has open contempt for it.

Because this Christmas is antithetical to its arrogant supremacy.

This Christmas is incompatible with its rabid nationalism.

This Christmas is counter to its ravenous capitalism.

This Christmas is resistant to its closed borders and erected walls.

This Christmas will not consent to its heartlessness, its callousness, its myopic America First hubris.

And this Christmas, is now hiding here in plain sight among the “least of these:”

It is the weary father of four taking refuge from ICE in a suburban church building.

It is the exhausted family sprinting through barren borderlands under the cover of darkness.
It is the transgender teenager trying to feel at home within their own body, while being terrorized by lawmakers and preachers from without.

It is the homeless veteran starving to death on the corners of its opulent megachurches.

It is the grievously ill toddler whose parents have exhausted their resources trying to keep him breathing.
It is the young black man terrified during a traffic stop, because he has seen this viral body cam video a hundred times before.

This is the Christmas these Christians are assailing-- and no one else.

And so this season, while they hide behind ceremonial religion, armed with recklessly wielded Bible verses, dressed in ornamental piety, and drenched in flowery prayers and sweet songs-- these religious people wage their war on Christmas; with every social media diatribe, with every piece of legislation, with every cell phone complaint to police, with every ICE raid, with every homophobic rant, with every manufactured crisis, with every incendiary Sunday sermon.

White Evangelical Christianity as it is currently constructed in America cannot peaceably coexist with the Jesus of the scriptures; with the truth of the baby in the center of the Nativity, with the gritty off-white reality of Christmas-- which is why it is choosing to remove him.

We cannot let this happen.

We who seek to emulate Jesus and guard humanity need to speak this truth. We need to oppose their perennial act of aggression and their annual victim rhetoric.

We need to fight for the sick child, the migrant family, the transgender teenager, the homeless veteran, the young black man; because when we do, we are perpetuating the heart of the Middle Eastern child, born under duress in the place where livestock dined-- the one who turned the world upside down in the name of a compassion that knew no borders and a love that had no walls.

Yes there is a war on Christmas.

And we’ve chosen our side.

Reporting in the new issue of the Washington Monthly , Daniel Block drove into Trump Country: The area, represented by retiring rightist Bob Goodlatte, hard up against West Virginia from Shendoah River Lakes way up north way down through Harrisonburg to Lynchburg and Roanoke, VA-06-- PVI R+13, where Trump beat Hillary 60-35%. The new congressman will be Ben Cline, who beat Democrat Jennifer Lewis 60-40%. "In March,wrote Block, "a FiveThirtyEight-commissioned survey found that even 58 percent of 'reluctant' Trump voters, a fifth of his 2016 coalition, have no regrets, and that this group’s impression of the president had gradually improved over the past ten months. An August 2018 study by Pew indicates that Trump voters feel almost exactly the same way about the president as they did in November 2016-- that is, generally positive. This is especially true in areas such as Virginia’s Sixth. Unlike the many Rust Belt converts who opted for Trump out of a sense of economic malaise, Shenandoah Valley’s evangelicals appear to have voted for the president in hopes of advancing a socially conservative agenda-- particularly with regards to abortion. By appointing conservative judges, Trump has delivered."

But what Block was looking for-- and found-- were newly energized Democratic activists. "I had trouble thinking that Sixth District Democrats couldn’t perform better," he wrote. "Barack Obama won 41.2 percent of the district’s vote in 2008 and 39.5 percent in 2012, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 34.9. Meanwhile, the nation’s economic boom has not really touched this part of Virginia, and Democrats told me that they often had the most success connecting with residents when it came to discussing social welfare. “You start talking about wanting to expand Medicare, and they relate to that,” Campbell said. But it wasn’t enough. “At the end of the conversation, they still won’t agree to vote for the candidate who wants to expand that,” she said. “There’s still an extra hump.”

The "hump" is partially the product of conservative Christianity and Fox News. But in Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District, there’s another element that I hadn’t considered until I visited: intense social pressure. In places where Trumpism is so widespread, identifying as a liberal carries risks-- social, financial, and perhaps even physical. For Democrats, this means that half the battle is simply normalizing their party.

...Donna Bible, an eleventh-generation Rockingham County resident, said that conservative pressure was particularly intense for women. “I know that a lot of women, if they didn’t feel oppressed by their husbands, if they didn’t feel like they needed to tow the family line, they would speak out,” she said. The product of a Republican family, she speaks from experience. “I think I became a Democrat because of that issue more than any other. It is infuriating to be a woman in a patriarchal society.”

Initially, the idea that people might be browbeaten into suppressing their progressive beliefs struck me as overwrought. But the more people I spoke with, the clearer it became that intimidation-- while usually muted-- was real. “The back of my truck has two Obama stickers, an ‘I vote Democrat’ sticker, a Hillary Clinton sticker, and now a Jennifer Lewis sticker,” Goebel told me. “I had a note left that said, ‘You’re a traitor.’ ” Other anecdotes seemed more serious. Morrison said that during a small anti-Trump rally she helped organize, her group encountered a number of counterprotestors, one of whom was brandishing a large rifle.

The climate of hostility in Shenandoah was also evident in a photo Morrison showed me from the Shenandoah County Fair. The Republican Party’s booth, located directly across from the Democratic Party’s booth, featured a sign telling voters to “#WalkAway from Hate, Socialism and Violence, especially from Killing Babies and Raping Children.” (The county sheriff and a member of the county board of supervisors, who showed up to add their own posters to the GOP station, had the sign taken down after the Democrats complained.)

...[R]estoring the Democratic brand in rural America isn’t only, or even primarily, about defeating Donald Trump. The president attained an Electoral College victory despite losing the popular vote because of razor-thin margins in traditionally Democratic parts of the Midwest. But Democrats’ struggles in rural America predate the president and will persist after he is gone. Given the Senate’s disproportionate representation of increasingly conservative rural states, making inroads in these regions is critical for the Democratic Party’s long-term success.