Understanding Haywire America

IT BEARS REPEATING that academicians and journalists are observing, studying, writing about, and hopefully explaining two distinct but interconected phenomena in contemporary America; the rise of Donald J. Trump and the Trump movement, and the rise of White Christian Nationalism. Journalist Angela Denker wrote: "Red State Christians; Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump", in which the author interviews a wide variety of Americans, asks pertinant questions, and shares her insights gained on the motivations of Trump supporters. It is evident that Denker does not have an entirely neutral, unbiased attitude and approach towards her subject matter; she does not regard the Trump movement as beneficial to America. She reveals, using direct interviews, that often times people who support Trump are motivated by misconceptions, factual errors, demonstrably incorrect notions of reality. Their mistaken belief that Trump's legal troubles are not of his own making, for example, their willlingness to believe lies, leads them to support bad policies advocated by Trump by ignroing their negative consequences. Whatever you dislike, ignore it, whatever you want to believe, believe it. When the voters support bad policy,the United States takes unwise courses of action, a country gone haywire. A pair of researcher, Gorski and Perry, published an illuminating study of white Christian nationalism in their seminal work; "The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to Democracy". She traces the history of this far right extremist marriage of politics and religion back to its origins, which, understandably, can be shown to date back to the first establishment of European culture in North America. Athough John Locke and the earlist advocates of democracy envisioned a secular democratic state, the spread of democracy in modern western civilization quite predictably engendered a strong, vibrant religious community, which has always included a significant percentage of the population. The most conservative Christian denominations in America, the evangelical denominations, had traditionally not attempted to organize politically, until the "Moral Majority" of the 1970s. As the book's title clearly indicates, the authors consider white Christian nationalism a threat to American democracy. "Domionists" is a term applied to the zealously religious and patriotic community which advocates formally making the United States a "Christian country", Christianity the formal, established religion. The most ardently faithful among these people want to go a huge step further; They seek to replace the American legal system with Biblical law, including the harshness inherent in both the Old and New Testaments. The Christian religion is the exact opposite of a democracy. It is, if anything, an absolute, divine right monarchy. Jesus is the "king", empowered by the will of God. This is nothing other than standard, basic Christian theology. That is perhaps at least peratly why thsoe who are both most fervantly patriotic and the most religious are not concerned about whether the future Christianization of the U.S. be carried out and manitained democratically. Bringing God back to America, (God was evidently once here, in America, but for some reason no longer is, presumably because we the American people somehow expelled him) is of such importance, that it matters not how it is accomplished, so their reasoning goes, as long as it is accomplished. And that, in a nutshell, is percisely why these people and this movement are so dangerous, so undesirable, and, ultimately, so un-American and unpatriotic.