Religion, Rising, and Falling In Politics

A YEAR AND A HALF has passed since the last presidential election, and surveys indicate that the dishonest people who claimed that the election was stolen from Trump are making the same claim, and that they will never stop doing so. If they were decent people, they would be now have acknowledged that Biden won fair and square, and that that Trump's big lie was and remains a big lie. If they, the seventy five million or so who embrace the lie, were decent people, they never would have embraced Trump's traitorous lie to begin with. An important fact merits consideration. Nobody, but nobody has ever suggested the possibility that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Approximately seventy five million Americans, however, have indicated with dead set certainty that the election was indeed stolen, no question. What that tells you is that the big lie is spoken out of a sense of irrational religious devotion, purely emotional based, unsupported by fact of evidence, similar to the manner in which zealously religious people express with absolute surety that their religion and their religion alone is the true religion, for themsleves, and for everyone else. Doubt is an unpleasant state of mind, thus people substitute certainty where certainly belongs not. Indications are that Trump will run again, and that he will use fidelity to his lie as a litmus test for the loyalty of his supprters. This will place the other Republican presidential candidates in the primary season to decide whether to rebuke Trump, or accede to his perfidy. "we are never deceived, we only deceive ourselves" said Goethe. Those lying for Trump have brainwashed themselves. In his seminal monograph "American Theocracy", Kevin Philips demonstrates how the Republican party has been coopted by the extreme religious right, the first religious political party in American history. Philips reminds us that widespread religious fanaticism, along with out of control public and private debt, military over extension, and depletion of natural resources have all contributed to the decline of civilizations, world wide. The United States is victimized by them all. Of these alarming trends, the rise of political right wing religious zealotry is perhaps the most destructive, because it underpins and reinforces all the others. It may be that the election of Jimmy Carter engendered within American political conservatism the idea that politics and Christian fervor could be conjoined to produce a political coalition which could become a dominant force in Amercan society and culture; hence, the rise of the "moral majority" in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, and Ronald Reagan, a converted Democrat. The Republican party is the current incarnation of this movement, a movement which has now irretrievably attached itself to Donald Trump, an attachment which may prove to be more harmful then beneficial to its future. The degree to which Trump's evangelical Republican suport base refuses to relenquish its embrace of the big election lie may determine the future of this seemingly contradictory ideology.