Project Blitz: Make America Christian Again

It is easy to laugh at America's evangelical 'Christians'. Just the other day one of the 'televangelists' said in all seriousness:
“I really believe that if Jesus was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn’t be riding a donkey...Think about it for a minute. He’d be in an airplane preaching the gospel all over the world.” For this reason Jesse Duplantis needs a new luxury jet at a cost $54 million.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...c?guccounter=1

Could that $54 million be spent feeding the poor, why should he care when he and his Brethren are using the Republican Party in a new phase of activism to introduce Bills into state legislatures designed to make Christianity the defining principles of the Law?

Project Blitz has already succeeded in introducing in five states “In God We Trust” bills [that] have become law since 2017, which will see the phrase emblazoned on public buildings, hung in schools and displayed on the side of public vehicles including police cars.

In addition bill are being introduced for a range of proclamations or resolutions – declaring a religious freedom day, or Christian heritage week that can then be used to get religious teaching into schools.

And most critical of all:
they include resolutions in favour of “biblical values concerning marriage and sexuality”, such as “establishing public policy favoring adoption by intact heterosexual, marriage-based families” and “establishing public policy favoring intimate sexual relations only between married, heterosexual couples”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...eshape-america

Thanks for posting. I had not heard of this. I have heard that a 'billionaire donors network' have realized money goes further in influencing politics. These issues appear to introduced at state levels. Seems like a lot goes under the radar, that is not on the national level. It seems to me that some of these measures are, just excuses to attack classes people for being, 'gender variants'.

I like to speak from personal experiences. I must have heard a thousand times, people saying that our youth started having more problems, "when they tool prayer out of schools". So in this popular view, our youth would be better behaved with school prayer. I tend to believe that it was not that important. Looking back, I see the course in civics, that taught us we are part of governing, and collective beings. But an more effective tool that kept us in line, was corporal punishment, in the form we called 'swats', in my middle school years. And corporal punishment in general. I know that is not coming back, but it sure was an effective control tool for parents.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

It is easy to laugh at America's evangelical 'Christians'. Just the other day one of the 'televangelists' said in all seriousness:
“I really believe that if Jesus was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn’t be riding a donkey...Think about it for a minute. He’d be in an airplane preaching the gospel all over the world.”

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I'm sure he would not be spouting this kind of liberal/socialistic nonsense either:

"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

How is is that these people can spend so much time reading the bible but somehow miss most of the key messages?

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Originally Posted by filghy2

I'm sure he would not be spouting this kind of liberal/socialistic nonsense either:
"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
How is is that these people can spend so much time reading the bible but somehow miss most of the key messages?

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I think the problem the Evangelicals have with the 'key messages' is that it isn't their key message. Google some Christian ideas and often the websites linked to 'evangelical's will be replete with quotes from Old Testament books but few if any from Jesus himself. Indeed, one of the peculiarities of the Evangelicals today is that they simultaneously quote the Jewish bible while holding the view that Jews must either accept they have been wrong for 2,000 years and accept Jesus is the Messiah, or roast for an eternity in the ovens of hell, though I don't suppose they word it like that.

There are two faces to this movement. One is focused on 'God, Country and Family' and appears to reject the social liberalism of the 1960s as a form of gross immorality that denies God, leads to the dissolution of the family, and replaces 'America First' with 'Identity First'. Hence the focus on rolling back Civil Rights era legislation. But the other face they show, more theological in origin, sounds increasingly like a death cult, fixated as it is on the End of the World, the Second Coming of Christ the Lord, the 'Tribulations' and the final victory of Jesus. Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem is seen as a major step forward in the realisation of their dream, which may not be life in the here and now, but the hereafter, which they seem to want to happen as soon as possible. If anything, this may actually express an existential anguish about their world, their 'America' as if it were beyond salvation in the here and now and they yearned for a 'final reckoning' in which their beliefs will be confirmed as The Truth.

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Originally Posted by yodajazz

Thanks for posting. I had not heard of this. I have heard that a 'billionaire donors network' have realized money goes further in influencing politics. These issues appear to introduced at state levels. Seems like a lot goes under the radar, that is not on the national level. It seems to me that some of these measures are, just excuses to attack classes people for being, 'gender variants'.
I like to speak from personal experiences. I must have heard a thousand times, people saying that our youth started having more problems, "when they tool prayer out of schools". So in this popular view, our youth would be better behaved with school prayer. I tend to believe that it was not that important. Looking back, I see the course in civics, that taught us we are part of governing, and collective beings. But an more effective tool that kept us in line, was corporal punishment, in the form we called 'swats', in my middle school years. And corporal punishment in general. I know that is not coming back, but it sure was an effective control tool for parents.

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The US being a diverse and complex place makes this issue equally complex. There was a time when the Moral Majority associated with Jerry Falwell supported segregation, until Falwell realised that the tactics Martin Luther King used to great success could be adopted by the 'Christian Right', whereupon they settled their differences with the Catholics, formed a more united or more inclusive 'front' and, critically, latched on to the Republican Party as their chosen vehicle, even to the extent of supporting divorcee Reagan where before they had opposed candidates who were divorced. There is an interesting article on this which was published in 2012 and argues the movement has all but died, whereas since 2012 it may be seen to have found a new means of placing its policy preferences on the statute book and is therefore anything but dead.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/05/5216/

It seems to me that while it has a long pedigree, the kind of politics associated with the 'Religious right' or 'Evangelical Christians' in its present form is a negative reaction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and what they describe as the 'liberalism' of the 1970s and 1990s in particular, all of which undermine the other holy trinity, 'God, Family and Country'. I suspect that if you take the longer view, what these groups relate to most is the idea that America -their America- was built by White, European, Christian communities as their refuge from a corrupt Europe, and that their project was endorsed as much by God as by Man, and that the two cannot be separated.

There may have been a time when Christian groups traded their religious independence for a secular state, each one agreeing not to challenge the other when most communities in the US were Christian in one form or another. But as the 20th century expanded with more diverse immigrants, the de facto Christian complexion of American society no longer maintained its dominance. This might not have mattered in a country which also had austere laws on social relations ranging from marriage and abortion to the limits to what could be seen on stage and screen, but as this 'broke down' beginning in the 1960s, the reaction was co-ordinated political campaigning designed to 'stop the rot' just as today the policy platform is a more aggressive form of policy reversal as seen in the Project Blitz agenda.

But this has also affected areas such as education, where since the 1970s millions of dollars have been pumped into Universities to fund conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation and the Ethics and Public Policy Centre. The irony of this is that while it is clear the left has had little impact on American education -all those students who graduated since 1967 if they were truly indoctrinated would not vote Republican-the actual outcome of the Conservative infiltration of universities may not be Republican voters as such, but a more general decline in the view that university is even worth going to.
The Conservatives were pouring money into institutions that are now regarded by key voters for the Republican Party as a waste of time, with the chilling thought that at a time when the USA -along with every other country- needs an education for the 21st century, the country has a President who shows no interest in it at every level. This article offers a grim view of the situation (the second link is a thesis on Conservative think tanks in academia)-
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...o-much/533130/
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED499166.pdf

Lastly, for now, there is an ironic comparison to be made: those European States where there was no separation of Church and State have become pioneers of socially liberal legislation, while the USA where there has been an historic separation of Church and State appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Although there is but a tenuous comparison to be made between the two conservative parties, in the UK the Conservative Party has embraced diversity (not without controversy within its ranks) to the extent that the current Government is staffed by men and women who do not believe in God, are proud to be heterosexual or gay, believe in climate change, and in the case of our Home Secretary -ranked no 4 in the hierarchy of Govt -is the Muslim son of bus driver from Pakistan. It is simply unthinkable that any of those Tories would be welcome in the Cabinet of the President, or make it to Congress as Senators.

The real danger it seems to me is that this group of people have targeted State legislation as the key means to 'change America', and that this may well become the most divisive battleground in US politics.