While we’re singing Silent Night and commemorating the Three Wise Men and their gifts to Baby Jesus, let’s not forget there are those who are bent on abolishing the whole New Testament with its story of love and sacrifice and doing unto others, and replacing the refugee Jesus born in a manger with the vengeful God of the Old Testament, dripping with blood from the conquest of the Promised Land, and a God still drying the water from his beard left there from drowning everyone but Noah and his family for their “wickedness” in ignoring God’s commands.
That’s the difference between the Christian Jesus we commemorate Christmas Day and the Republican “Jesus” who is anything but the one in the New Testament. Truth is, we worship a different God (if we worship the traditional Christian one) and we effectively live in a different country from those who want to turn this into their version of “Christian” instead of Constitutionalist America.
So if you don’t recognize Trump’s America as the one we used to live in, here’s why. And if you can’t understand why Republicans want to turn the presidency into a monarchy, here’s why.
It’s this Old Testament God the Dominionists worship, whatever their protestations about calling themselves Christians who supposedly follow the New Testament Jesus. And it is these Dominionists, otherwise known as Reconstructionists, who want Trump installed as King and the Republican Party “majority” made permanent by first suppressing, but if necessary destroying, the Republic they supposedly swore an oath to protect.
They do not, and will not, honor that oath because they suppose themselves to be worshipping a higher power. It is this commitment to Restore the rule of Christ the King on earth that drives them to support the mad King pretensions of Donald J. Trump. They are no more Christians than the Christian Identity Nazis who have, unsurprisingly, become their fellow travelers.
Mother Jones has been covering the Dominionists for quite some time, as have others on Daily Kos. But it is time to recognize that these Dominionists have pursued their program of seizing power to the point that we stand of the verge of losing our democratic Republic. The seemingly incomprehensible insistence by Republicans on denying any and all facts in their defense of Donald Trump is because they do not see themselves as defending Donald Trump, only. They are defending the man who is installing the means to impose their views on everyone, right in front of our eyes. This impeachment is not just a test of our constitutional principles; it is a test of faith to them, and that faith demands they defend to the death someone who is using his office to destroy the very thing he swore to defend.
In December 2005 Jon Sugg published in Mother Jones A Nation Under God
“The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise,” Gary North, a top Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. “Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be denied citizenship.”
Please note, the suppression of voting has been a growing problem under Republicans for quite some time, but it became a determined program only since the Bush regime, and only under Trump did Republicans begin to openly solicit and accept “help” from another white Christian supremacist, Vladimir Putin. Today, Moscow Mitch and Trump are conspiring with the Federalist Society not just to put hundreds of “conservative” jurists on the bench, they are also conspiring to fill the bench with jurists sworn not to protect and interpret the Constitution but to Reconstruct it, a la Roy Moore and the Dominionists.
Moscow Mitch is a Dominionist supporter, not just a grubber after power. That is why he doesn’t even pretend to be an impartial juror as his constitutionally imposed oath for impeachment trials requires, on top of his oath of office to defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Those oaths imposed by humans mean nothing if you believe a “higher power” and a “greater plan” is demanded by God.
As Sugg noted about Moore “he’s also arguably the single most significant politician to owe his ascendancy to Christian Reconstruction—an obscure but increasingly potent theology whose top exponents hold that Christian crusaders must conquer and convert the world, by the sword if necessary, before Jesus will return.” Again, this was 2005, long before Trump. But today, Trump is being defended by at least 177 Dominionist “religious leaders”. He’s the new, and far more dangerous, Roy Moore. The “unhinged” defenders of Trump are listening to other voices, and what they hear is dangerous to us and our citizenship.
You may recognize that number of 177 as the number of signees to a letter in support of Trump, denouncing the editorial in Christianity Today. And yesterday, an editor on the Christian Post resigned when his board backed Trump.
We have here not a political division alone. This is a division between those who worship the Refugee Jesus who fled persecution and those who worship the Reconstructionist Jesus who tortures and persecutes those who refuse to submit publicly. It’s the difference between the Old Testament God who instructed the conquerors to dash children’s heads against rocks and kill all the men and boys and keep alive only the virgin girls for their use, and the New Testament Jesus who said God is Love and what you do for the least of persons you do for God. It’s the difference between giving refugees from torture and violence even a manger to rest in, and barring them at the border at the point of a gun or ripping children from mothers and throwing them all in cages.
This Christmas we can’t sing Silent Night and rest in peace. We must sing Which Side are You On and gird our loins for the battle of our lives in the New Year of 2020. Because what is at stake is not just an election. It is the very nature, the heart and soul of our democratic Republic.
Merry Christmas.
Treasure our common gift as citizens of the power to vote, and make sure others who have it realize it is time to use it or lose it.