It's not "Jesus and John Wayne" that You Need to Be Afraid Of
Yes, Conservative Churches Play with Guns. The Spirit of Liberal Hegemony Deploys Predator Drones
In today's video I begin to get at the invisible religion at the center of "the blob" or blue church, which is the hole that the Protestant Establishment has left.
I begin with the current progressive Evangelical moral panic over dread Christian Nationalism. It isn't that this isn't a problem. Religion is always and Politics is now. Religion is dollars and Politics is cents and it's tough to navigate that.
The greater threat is the religion that develops unseen and colonizes unawares. We get all this panic about militarism in the church but the militarism in the invisible church that is actually motivating war is the spirit of liberal hegemony.
John J Mearsheimer is getting a lot of attention now or his lecture he gave in 2015 where he predicts the current war between Ukraine and Russia
. He was right. We've been building up to this since 2008.
The deeper question is why US liberalism is so militaristic? It is our religion and that religion isn't "Jesus and John Wayne" its our spirit of liberal hegemony in a unipolar world.
While some evangelicals are breathless about dread "Christian Nationalism" and find it to be problematic, it is not nearly as dangerous as the ways the US has used its military to try to socially engineer other countries. While "Onward Christian Soldiers" might make politicians do pushups on stage, Onward Liberal Soldiers has put us in 7 wars since the end of the Cold War, mostly to the misery and moral injury of our soldiers.
In subsequent videos I'm going to need to go further into how the Protestant Establishment morphed into the Blue Church and how THAT has destroyed liberal Christianity as an institution becoming something that doesn't just play with guns but wields drones for "democracy".
As always, it brings me great distress to agree with a Calvinist so much.
Seriously, thanks for the work. I confess my biggest concern is that only "grey hairs" will get the significance of this realism. The "Blue Church" seems to have lost the ability for honest self reflection.
I would argue that at some point you're going to have to dip your toe in the stream of cultural shift that has been brought on by the baby boomers. Skipping across it hopping from one corollary rock to another might keep your feet dry but sooner or later I think you're going to have to face the fact that the children of the greatest generation have abandoned all that came before them and now are reaping the whirlwind.... And if they don't retire soon might nuke the planet with their foolishness.