Southern Baptist Convention Nashville TN
This essay is dedicated in appreciation to
Paul Pearson
Southern Baptist pastors have been spiraling downward into the abyss of fiction and fraud for generations, pushing the iniquitous sword attacking civil rights, women, people of color, and the customary whipping boy for ignorant people: the LGBTQIA+ community. From Billy Graham and G. Marion “Pat” Robertson to the modern moronic Baptist clergy buttressing the bluster and bloviating falsehoods and lies of the rapscallion Franklin Graham, to the neo-Nazi religious radicals in Texas and the Dakotas seeking to end democracy and establish a fascist theocracy in its place, none have practiced anything taught by the Jesus of the New Testament as recorded at the earliest more than 3 generations after the early congregants lived and met in small communist communities (Acts 2:44; “And all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. And all who believed were together and had all things in common”: παντες δε οι πιστευοντες ησαν επι το αυτο και ειχον απαντα κοινα.)1
White christian evangelical nationalists working for a fascist theocratic overthrow of the USA Constitution and ending civil and legal writes for women, education, LBGTQ+ Americans
White christian evangelical nationalist Baptist pastors in the USA are identical in every way to the white christian evangelical nationalist Lutheran pastors in the 1930s-1940s who endorsed and brought to power Adolf Hitler2 with many joining Hitler’s military and standing sentry of his concentration camps and gas chambers while lashing out at Jews,3 Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons,4 Quakers,5 Muslims,6 and Mennonites,7 minorities, women,8 and gays9 demanding that they be exterminated with many serving as executioners10 of the ones they draconically determined stood against their tepid totem god.11 White christian evangelical nationalists saw in Trump their new savior who would rid the USA of all they despised and launched hate-filled libel against the minorities they see as evil and the spawn of their mythical satan.12
Women as priests and bishops in the early church (Photo credit: London Daily Mail)
The German Roman Catholics had Cardinal Aloisius Muench legitimatize their antisemitism and call for the execution of LGBTQ+ and women who “overstepped their limits” (including the historical fable that the “church” had only male priests and bishops, while in reality, women were the primary “shepherds”13 of the fledgling faith).14 Nazi pastors in the Third Reich, identical to Baptists in the USA 2012-Present (such as Marjorie Taylor Green–R(GA)15, want to “tear down the wall” separating church and state and embrace a spiritual “homeland” for all white christian evangelical nationalists.16 It was codified in a law that demanded “One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!”17 that is the mantra of Texas Nazi Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas Republiconazis18 in the state legislature aping and frothing over an armageddon to destroy the infidels of their totem gods19 and create a white nation with liberty to none unless the pastors promulgate the word of their god.20
Thomas Jefferson on separation of state and church
The religious right’s Faustian bargain with the GOP isn’t a new feature of the Trump era. It is a position taken for close to half a century, with the hope that the GOP would support this exclusionary political theology: the idea that the United States is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, with a Christian Constitution, whose enemies (internal and external) are enemies of Christ. In recent years, white American evangelicalism has successfully been exported to places like Brazil and Bolivia, where evangelicals have become the chief political defenders of right-wing leaders such as President Jair Bolsonaro and Jeanine Áñez. The World Congress of Families, a U.S.-based evangelical organization designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center,21 has found an eager audience in post-Soviet Russia, where wealthy conservatives have joined forces to promote the traditional family and to slow or repeal legislation granting rights to LGBTQ people. Many evangelicals now see Vladimir Putin as a defense against the decadence of secular Western culture.22
END NOTES
- See also <a href=”https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-u-s-christians-who-pray-for-putin/” target=”_new”>https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-u-s-christians-who-pray-for-putin/</a>. ↩
- Solberg, Mary, ed. A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. ↩
- Gerlach, Wolfgang. And the Witnesses were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Jews. Trans. Victoria J. Barnett. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Cf. Probst, Christopher. Demonizing the Jew: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2012. ↩
- Nelson, David Conley. Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. ↩
- Schmitt, Hans A. Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997. ↩
- Greble, Emily. Sarajevo, 1941-1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. ↩
- King, Christine. The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non-Conformity. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1982. ↩
- Spicer, Kevin P. and Martina Cucchiara, eds. The Evil that Surrounds Us: The WWII Memoir of Erna Becker-Kohen. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017. Cf. Crane, Cynthia. Divided Lives: The Untold Story of Jewish-Christian Women in Nazi Germany. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. ↩
- The German Nazis buttressed by the white christian evangelical Lutherans twisted scripture to justify their attacks. See Heschel, Susannah. The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. ↩
- https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/christianity-and-the-holocaust. Cf. Ericksen, Robert P. and Susannah Heschel, eds. Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999. ↩
- https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/good-white-christian-women-nazi-germany. Cf. Helmreich, Ernst Christian. The German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979. Cp. Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. (DD256.5 .S756 2003) and, Bergen, Doris. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996; and Ericksen, Robert P. Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Cf. Hastings, Derek. Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cp. Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000; and Hitler’s Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008; and, Kornberg, Jacques. The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. ↩
- https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2018/november/evangelicalism-and-politics/. ↩
- “The meaning of ordination and how women were gradually excluded”. National Catholic Reporter. 2013-01-16. Cf. Osiek, ed., and transl. by Kevin Madigan and Carolyn (2005). Ordained women in the early church: a documentary history (Johns Hopkins pbk. ed.; Bernadette Brooten, “Junia … Outstanding Among the Apostles” (Romans 16:7), Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration (Paulist Press, 1977.). Baltimore, Md. (u.a.): Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. p. 186. Cf. Arthur Frederick Ide (1983 and 1984). Woman a Priest, Bishop, and Laity in the early Catholic church to 440 A.D. with a translation and critical commentary on Roman 15 and other relevant scripture and patrological writings on women in the early Christian church. Mesquite, TX: IHP. Cp. https://www.ncronline.org/news/theology/researcher-artifacts-show-early-church-women-served-clergy. ↩
- Carroll, James. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: a History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. ↩
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-speech-putin-b2038305.html; and https://www.ft.com/content/fd870fa9-007a-4cd4-bffc-d72aa2a35767. ↩
- Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). ↩
- “Directives of the Church Movement German Christians (Movement for a National Church) in Thuringia, 1933,” in The Nazi Years: A Documentary History, ed. Joachim Remak (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1990), 95–96. ↩
- https://www.arthuride.com/texas-republiconazis-are-stupid-and-the-state-is-growing-dumber/. ↩
- https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/protestant-churches-and-nazi-state. ↩
- https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-nationalist-roots-of-white-evangelical-politics. ↩
- https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/world-congress-families. ↩
- https://flaglerlive.com/174963/putin-us-evangelicals/. Cf. https://marciapally.com/2022/05/why-many-american-white-evangelicals-support-putin/. Cp. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/why-do-american-white-evangelicals-support-putin/13846702, and https://bostonreview.net/articles/the-u-s-christians-who-pray-for-putin/. ↩
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