Randy Evangelicals Recruiting for the Rapture

Racism and Patriarchy Are The Paths They've Chosen

While the vast majority of religions include an observation/prediction of what the End of the World will look like, various sects of Christianity treat what’s happening today as a prelude to extinction. 

For the BigChurchvangelicalist types, this is often described in terms of battles and wars. Believers are told they are the army which will sweep away the unclean, setting up the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Some versions hold that the faithful will be lifted up to heaven, others say the unfaithful will descend into the abyss of hell or that earth becomes hell. This series of events are called the rapture, and fear of and/or promises for that time are the carrot and the stick wielded by fundamentalist and evangelical leaders.

The merger of the End of Times theologies and the modern day Republican party has been mutually beneficial. Rapidly growing congregations in churches disdainful of traditional protestant/catholic services are entertained with flash and glitter and noise and then recruited as foot soldiers for right wing causes.

Locally, the most high profile version of this is the Awaken Church, with several ‘campuses,’ and  academies for training would-be warriors and showing women how being male-focused is part of the natural order of things.

There was a time when evangelical Christians mostly stayed away from politics, focused on spiritual offerings to build their congregations. And the notion of religiously based private education was looked down upon as something Catholics favored.

All of that started to change in the 1950s as mostly Southeastern states grappled with  implementation of Brown v. Board of Education (1955), mandating the integration of public schools across the country.

Supreme Court decisions in Abington v. Schempp (1961) and Engel v. Vitale (1962) prohibiting mandatory Bible readings and state-sanctioned prayer in public schools, fueled the growth of Segregation Academies, where White parents sent their White children to avoid race mixing and contamination by the secular forces fueling social change.

In the late 1970s, the Internal Revenue Service began challenging the tax exempt status claimed by segregated educational institutions. And those institutions were losing, culminating with Bob Jones University being told by the Supreme Court its racist admissions policies violated “fundamental national public policy.” 

During that period conservative (we’re not racist) leaders looked for an issue capable of motivating right-thinking voters to the polls. Political activist Paul Weyrich identified abortion as a potential issue to really mobilize conservative evangelicals politically and to help build the Moral Majority.

Here’s religious researcher Randall Balmer, in a 2021 Guardian op ed: 

• The beauty of the religious right’s embrace of abortion as a political issue is that it allowed leaders to camouflage the real origins of their movement: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.

Proof that this tactic has worked came with a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in 2020 giving private religious schools the same access to public funds as private “nonsectarian” schools. 

And the Court is leaning so far to the right that Roe v. Wade has been effectively overturned, unleashing a torrent of activism aiming to punish women, providers, and even someone driving a patient to a abortion clinic across state lines.

The anti-abortion movement has never been pro-life; if it were, the death penalty would be gone and nurturing programs for children would be universal. Instead, these same activists are planning to ban the birth control methods that sociologists say changed the roles of women.

Ultimately, reproductive care is healthcare for women. And there are consequences beyond whether birthing is involved or not.

Congenital syphilis makes a roaring come back - in anti-abortion states

• The article mentions the shortage of treatment drugs, the increase of the number of babies being born with this, and the babies dying.  It also mentions that Republicans clawed back a large sum of money the US government was giving to states to deal with this….but the article failed to mention…

• Failed to mention that the rise in Congenital syphilis in pregnant women is mostly happening only in states that passed anti-abortion laws.  Why would anti-abortion laws impact syphilis rates?  Because Planned Parenthood is normally the number one organization helping people with STD’s.  Because Planned Parenthood is the number one prenatal care giver to women with little or no health insurance.  When a mother has prenatal care, she is screened and treated for STD’s.

• What happens in anti-abortion states?  They took away funding to Planned Parenthood. Funding for all its services and did their best to close them down.  Per the New York Times over 61 clinics closed completely after the Dobbs decision up til the article was published in June, many more will be closing after various legal challenges.

For conservative evangelicals, gender difference is foundational to their understanding of the social order. They believe that God created men and women to be very different, even opposites. And the women's primary calling is that of wife and mother.

The emergence of LGBTQ+ humans in society threatens that social order. Victorian-inspired criminalization was swept away by changes in public attitudes to the point where the ‘sacred vows’ of marriage were no longer limited by law. Reversing those changes is the a key to making sure evangelists vote. Throwing in a sexual angle speaks to the deep fears many people hide.

The rise of MAGA has enabled a systematic push back against both the rights and existence of LGBTQ+ citizens. School books and library collections are being scrutinized, banned, and shadow banned for mentions of sexuality, since part of the creepy-crawly right’s crusade is based on ‘grooming’ conspiracies about pedophilia. 

Drag queens recruiting and molesting children are at the center of many of these lurid fantasies, which is odd, since if you scan lists of arrested sex offenders, religious figures, right-leaning political types, and cops are the most often listed attributes. (What connects them all is that they are authority figures)

The twin sides of this conservative coin can be found in states (AR, AZ, FL, GA, ID, IN, IA, KY, MS, NH, ND, OK, SC, TN, TX, UT) that have banned Critical Race Theory to ‘protect kids.’ These same states all host child beauty pageants, sexually exploiting kids as young as two. These states aren't protecting kids — they're protecting bigots and predators. 

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Patriarchy is, according to political scientist Valerie Hudson and her colleagues, the “first political order.” And it is foundational to authoritarianism.

From Ms. Magazine, The Patriarchs’ War on Women:

• Authoritarian backsliding occurs when women are stripped of equal access, opportunity and rights in the workplace, in the public sphere and at home. By strengthening men’s control over the women and girls in their lives, authoritarian leaders strike a patriarchal bargain, doling out private authority in exchange for public loyalty to the strongman. Incidentally, many women buy into the bargain, too. Women from dominant groups and classes are often willing to promote conservative gender norms and policies that retrench the status quo. The policing of gender expression and relations becomes a powerful tool for promoting a hegemonic racial, religious or ethnic national identity.

• Thus, alongside assaults on democracy, patriarchal authoritarians also promote increased state control over women’s bodies; the subordination of women in public office and the workforce; permissiveness toward sexual assault, harassment or abuse; hypermasculine ideals; the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people; tolerance of violence toward women and girls; and an emphasis on the “traditional family,” in which the role of women is primarily domestic. Put simply, the patriarchal authoritarian worldview is that men are “men,” while women are wives and mothers. Everyone else is a threat to the system.

So it all comes down to the overarching conflict between representative democracy and authoritarian rule. This, in addition to climate change, is a real scenario of our end times.

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Wednesday’s Stuff You Should Read

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How gas utilities used tobacco tactics to avoid gas stove regulations Via NPR

• The documents show that natural gas utilities and their powerful trade group, the American Gas Association (AGA), focused on convincing consumers and regulators that cooking with gas is as risk-free as cooking with electricity. As the scientific evidence grew over time about the health effects from gas stoves, the industry used a playbook echoing the one that tobacco companies employed for decades to fend off regulation. The gas utility industry relied on some of the same strategies, researchers and public relations firms.

• The documents show that AGA and utility companies funded studies that countered the emerging research on health risks, sometimes without disclosing their financial support. The industry-backed studies focused on uncertainties in the health research and magnified them, leaving the impression that the science is not clear, even as evidence has accumulated about a link between using gas stoves at home and greater risk of respiratory illnesses.

• Research backed by the gas industry generated doubt and controversy over the health effects of stoves that affected policymaking around protecting people's health. It helped stop efforts to more stringently regulate gas stoves in at least one instance under the Reagan administration. And documents show the research may have helped thwart efforts to strengthen federal nitrogen dioxide pollution standards outdoors, which affects millions of Americans.

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Axios Explains: The myth of a U.S.-Mexico "open border" by Russell Contreras 

• As the Biden administration grapples with the soaring number of migrants and asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, conservative pundits and politicians have upped accusations that some Democrats support "open border" policies.

• The big picture: By using the term "open border," conservatives — including Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is seeking the role of House speaker — are suggesting that anyone can get into the U.S. without much hassle. But the reality is that the southern border is more fortified than it's ever been.

• Reality check: Since 1992, the U.S. has quadrupled the number of Border Patrol agents — from less than 5,000 to nearly 20,000 today.

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School vouchers are even worse than you think Via Lisa Needham at Public Notice

• Vouchers are also expensive. Florida had 18,585 students in their voucher program in the 2020-2021 school year, back when vouchers were provided only to students with disabilities and those from lower-income families. Florida spent almost $191 million taxpayer dollars on those students, approximately $10,555 per student, or over $1,000 more than the average of what Florida spent on public school students that year. 

• In Arizona, the average voucher is $15,189, or more than double the average amount spent per student in public schools. An estimate from the governor’s office shows that state’s universal program could cost $943 million for fiscal year 2024, with more than 97,000 students receiving vouchers. Fifty-three percent of all new education spending in Arizona for fiscal year 2024 will go to only 8.4 percent of students in the state. Finally, Arizona simply fills a debit card with money and gives that to parents, relying upon them to upload receipts for debit card transactions. In the last quarter of 2022, parents had failed to upload receipts for more than 17,000 transactions they had already made. 

• But the high cost of vouchers doesn’t matter when the real goal is to starve public schools. Nowhere is this more evident than in Texas, where the genesis for this most recent push for universal vouchers seems to have come from Gov. Greg Abbott’s latest foray into the culture wars over what children are taught. In an event earlier this year, Abbott stated school choice was necessary because of “an extraordinary movement to expand transgenderism in schools” in the state of Texas and that public school teachers were “using their positions to try to cultivate and groom these young kids” into being transgender.