How to Survive the TRUMPOCALYPSE and Build a Better America in 2017 – The Only New Year’s Resolution that Could Actually Make America Better
January 1, 2017 by
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Will we let America become a suicide vest strapped to the entire globe put there by a deranged apocalyptic evangelical cult in thrall to a megalomaniac fool? Make a New Year’s resolution that matters: De-convert a white evangelical today.
White Evangelical America must be rescued. Without white evangelicals voting for the party of lust, greed, infamy and chaos that Trump represents he would not have come close to becoming president.
Why did they vote for him? What can we do about it?
Simply put white evangelical America is a force rooting for chaos and disintegration on a par with Islamic extremists and terrorists. One group blows people up. The other group blew up America’s future with a frivolous and stunningly stupid vote.
Islamic extremism is a temporary plague. White American evangelicals will be here to deform America and eventually destroy us if they’re not repudiated rolled back and de-fanged as an evil force for global destruction.
We answer Islamic terrorists with drones, bombs, snipers and special ops. White evangelical American terror also needs to be stopped. The country they now run–via the third rate conman and groper they elected who will be the tool of hardcore white evangelicals in Congress–has nukes and is in the grip of people who don’t want to do anything about climate change. What could be more of a threat to your children and grandchildren?
This threat is far worse than Islamic terror. It’s a war of ideas for control of the most powerful country on earth. What’s at stake in a nuclear world tipping into irreversible climate change? Everything.
Evangelical style fundamentalism destroys people’s ability to reason and to process facts. How else to explain people who style themselves patriots voting for Putin’s lapdog? How else to describe a world view as anything but mental illness that holds that the earth was created ten thousand years ago, that evolution is a hoax and that global warming is not man-made?
The question of fake news, conspiracy theory-based “thinking” comes up.“How can these people believe this stuff?” people ask. The answer is simple: If from birth your brain is trained to believe alternative “facts” –say that science is a lie but the Bible is literally true—you have been conditioned to accept everything and anything but facts. Facts in fact become your enemy. Education becomes a threat. Self-willed group-think delusion is your life raft insurance against drowning in the ocean of truth that fundamentalists dismiss as doubt.
Most people embrace facts. Evangelicals try to “answer” them and dismiss them.
That’s why millions of white evangelical voters home school their children, send them to evangelical “colleges” only read listen to or watch “Christian news” and group in churches into defensive paranoid xenophobes.
The white evangelical community was ripe for the plucking by a phony sociopath demagogue. He was speaking to the already demented when he told them they could not trust anyone but him to tell them the truth, that no matter what the facts were he had inside special information to share. “Special information” way was already the way evangelicals already were thinking: “The World says evolution happened, the universe is billions of years old and climate change is real, but we know that the Bible says…” and so forth and so on.
What to do?
White evangelicals for the most part can’t be reasoned with. You might say “studies show,” and they’ll answer with a “But the Bible says” statement and quote a verse. I fled that (very profitable) world over 30 years ago and that way of thinking and have struggled with the emotional aftershocks. I’ve written about this exit most recently in my book WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace.
I’ve heard from many who have exited the evangelical certainty cult. Thus my statement that evangelicals can’t be reasoned with may be true most of the time but (like all certainty claims) it’s not true all of the time.
There’s hope. Many younger people raised in this fact-hating frightened cult can be saved. They can be given lives in an open world of ideas and inclusion. And I’m not advocating for atheism (though that’s a great and honorable tradition). I happen to be a Christian. I’ll be in church with three of my five grandchildren today.
What I’m not is a believer in doctrine as an answer to everything let alone a one-size-fits-all theology that gets one “saved.” Nor do I believe that the Bible is true in the way evangelicals think of it.
One result of evangelical literal Bible “thinking” is the rise of the cult of Christian Zionism that literally believe Jesus will come back soon and that his return depends of the State of Israel being there! So for these folks we need to craft American policy to fit their imaginary biblical narrative. A more dangerous idea could hardly be imagined except possibly for the denial of the reality of man-made global warming.
To help an evangelical escape the bondage of mental illness many roads out should be opened to them. What needs to go is certainty addiction. What needs to be embraced is paradox. No one ever blew up a mosque, an abortion clinic or church after shouting “But I could be wrong!”
The question: What can be done about Trump? is really a larger question. The real question is what can be done about the white evangelicals who as with the Islamic terrorists are now the sworn enemy of democracy and reason itself?
What has to be done is simple but hard. Reasonable people for whom facts and the planet matter need to make a conscious effort to undermine, answer, subvert and convert the white evangelical movement to doubt, to loss of faith and finally to reason, compassion and humanity.
For start so-called progressive evangelicals should no longer be given cover and respectability. Why? Because the so-called progressive evangelicals in turn mask the skull beneath the exterior pretense of caring. Social justice evangelical types, the so-called evangelical left, give cover to the vast majority of nefarious and mentally deranged white evangelical voters. They are as it were “good Germans” during the Nazi era. The evangelical Left helps deflect the glare of attention the white evangelical world deserves. And honestly they do it because the big bucks are still in the evangelical world.
The entire evangelical movement Right and Left needs to be exposed and demolished one questioning dissatisfied young person (and a few older ones too) at a time.
There is no nice smart version of believing in a god who made people to burn forever unless they “accept Jesus.” Trump is a petty vengeful, thin skinned loser. No wonder evangelicals love him– he’s very much like their “god.”
Let 2017 be the year sane Americans of all faiths or none talk the insane into sanity one evangelical at a time. To save America from Trump and to resist him is to try to save evangelicals from themselves and the planet from these self-harming mental patients.
It’s time to call the white evangelical movement what it is: a promoter of terror, unreasoning hatred and oppression. White evangelicals have empowered the billionaire class to rob us blind. They are dupes of the NRA cult of death. They’ve put us in bed with a man who hates freedom called Vladimir Putin. They’ve opened the door to global warming catastrophe. They’ve hired a fool to lead us.
For your 2017 resolution this New Year’s Day promise yourself to find ways to restore sanity to at least one evangelical. Deprogram someone, one conversation, a book, an idea at a time. The DE-conversion of the abused mentally ill people known as evangelicals must begin today. We need them to accept sanity as their personal savoir.
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P.S. If you want to know a little more about where I’m coming from and my perspective on politics, religion and the intersection of faith and life– here’s a new movie about me. (It’s below the poster on YouTube) scroll down and watch it for free…
WATCH “Let me be FRANK” HERE:
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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace
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