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It didn’t happened all at once.

We have been duped. A better way for me to express it as to say we are just now realizing that we were being duped over a very long period of time. “We” is everyone other than MAGAts and additional Russian assets if there are any. 

I am more than keenly aware that most people who think independently and fairly don’t even want to hear about anything related to organized religion. I understand that better than most, but let me tell you why we cannot keep the role of religion out of our reasoning processes when we’re trying to understand the process by which we were due. In a nutshell, the reason is because organized religion has been a primary tool by which this great delusion has occurred.

We would not have a Trump in the White House now if not for the fact that back when the fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention were successfully dismantling that once tolerable denomination—and I say tolerable because no religious hierarchy ever has been or ever will be free of dark corners, though some good can get accomplished despite that— they kept their sites set on a greater prize. The greater prize was the complete takeover of our federal government.

The days of trying to stomach comments that perhaps are well-intentioned though monstrously uninformed about all of us serving the same God regardless of our religious identifications or all people wanting the same basic things need to be as dead immediately as morality in the Republican Party. I’m a monotheist. I believe there is one God and one God only, but I do not believe for a second that everyone who claims to have a conception of God much less a connection to God has in mind the actual God.

In the United States context where “bigger is better” has long been a standard—until a micro-penised president cheated his way into the White House— who had frequently struggled to stay alive, adopted the same standard for themselves. When that happened, Christianity, for example, which is supposed to be based in service to all strugglers kicked servanthood to the curb and decided its deity henceforth would be Power at all costs. That was step one we could say. Step two came along when the principle of separation of synagogue/church/mosque and state was rejected. None of this happened in a loud and boisterous way. These things happened very gradually, your systematically. Most people hardly noticed.

Here’s another thing about the way organized religion is regarded by many people in the United States and probably in most of the first world. Spin doctors of the church worked days, nights, and weekends having religious groups participate in creating and sustaining the illusion that people of faith are kind and good and sweet and passive and stupid. Not many people want to be unkind or disrespectful to someone who seems to them to meet these criteria. That was part of the fatal flaw—approving the content of the message based on the emotional dynamics of how the messages presented.

I’m a retired professor of preaching to seminarians and public speaking to undergraduates. Plenty of public speakers, including professionals have believed that with the right emotional flavor—even with a bullshit message—they can persuade audiences to believe certain things and act in certain ways. Depending on personalities, for some speakers that is meant, they just gonna come across it so so sweet. For other speakers, the approach has been to sound aggressive from the pit or the lectern; be loud and demanding. Smart people like those of you reading this know that both of those approaches work. The merit of a message should reside exclusively in the message itself. 

Then, staying with the religious dimension of the duping about which I write, we run into the complication of being given false information by those people that we love and trust and respect and lean on. MAGAts breed MAGAts. 

In the last congregation, I served as a pastor, some of my congregants put together a booklet of several of my sermons that evidently were believed by many to be worth remembering to publish locally and informally. The question came up, what would the title be? My older son is a wordsmith, and I asked him if he could think of a good title for this project. He thought about it for a few days and came back with the title that those interested in publishing the booklet liked: Lies My Sunday School Teacher Told Me. 

As the booklet made its rounds in the community, and we shared with friends and family members and many of us, I started getting slammed—not because my liberal views were unacceptable, but because some who’d got a copy of the booklet were afraid I was diminishing well-intentioned and good-hearted Sunday School teachers. That was not my intention at all, nor the intention of my son and the little group of people who were distributing the booklet. Not many Sunday school teachers outside the world of MAGAts would intentionally lie to the children they teach at church. But many of those Sunday school teachers pass along lies and other untruths because someone whom they trusted told them what they were saying was truth. 

The fundamentalists who ended up splitting the Southern Baptist Convention wide open, leading to its eventual decline, counted on the gullibility of people who wanted to take at face value what anyone told told them if she or he was on the list of people to trust because of role and relationship. What I’m describing here more than any other single factor allowed evil to enter through the back door until there was enough momentum for evil to strut right through the front door. 

Exactly the same thing is happening today with the increased power of misinformation by the MAGAt instigators and enablers shamelessly attempting whenever possible to couch their words and deeds in religiosity. It’s still working and more effectively than even the evil shot-callers anticipated. It’s one thing to be duped to believing wrong information and being left with an understanding of what is true. It’s entirely something else to be duped into believing something that causes us to act in a ways that hurt ourselves as well as others.

Part of reclaiming all that has already been lost to the extent that is even possible requires us to call a lie a lie and refuse, even to listen to those that we already know are liars.. that means, for starters, not listening to anything that Trump or any member of his family or any appointee of his has to say because every one of them is a perverse soulless self-serving liar. I don’t care how religious they pretend to be. I don’t care how much MAGAt religious groups come to their aid.

It is an act of integrity and self-preservation and self-care to absent ourselves from liars and the information they want to dispense. Anyone who believes thst she or he still owes a liar a listening year is an idiot and a danger to the recovery of democracy. 

A disturbing informational tidbit—eerie and haunting. The late Judge Paul Pressler was a key figure in the takedown of the Southern Baptist Convention by which I mean the empowerment of fundamentalists only within that denomination. A protégé his is the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.

More later.

AI generated image of Pressler

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