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New Poll: Most Republicans Identify As 'Christian Nationalists'

New Poll: Most Republicans Identify As 'Christian Nationalists'

A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute reveals that more than half of Republicans don’t understand America and would like either Jesus Christ or Donald Trump to lead us to a God-ordained promised land flowing with milk, honey, unchecked grift, and bottomless cheese fries.

According to PRRI, 55 percent of Republicans qualify as Christian nationalists, per the survey’s criteria, as opposed to just 25 percent of independents and 16 percent of Democrats. At the same time, 83 percent of Democrats can be considered “skeptics” or “rejecters” of Christian nationalism, compared with just 43 percent of Republicans who feel the same way.

Meanwhile, those Christian nationalist views are, as you might have guessed, strongly predictive of support for Donald Trump.

According to PRRI, “Among those who hold favorable views of Trump, 55 percent qualify as Christian nationalists (21 percent Adherents and 34 percent Sympathizers). Only 15 percent of those who hold favorable views of President Joe Biden qualify as Christian nationalists (four percent Adherents and 11 percent Sympathizers).”

In other words, there’s a good reason the current House Speaker Mike Johnson thinks he’s Moses and the Alabama Supreme Court thinks eight-celled frozen embryos are human beings. Republicans are all hunkered down in a hermetically sealed room sniffing the same glue.

PRRI based its survey results on a five-point definition of Christian nationalism. Respondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed—either “mostly” or “completely”—with the following statements:

  • The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
  • U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
  • If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
  • Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
  • God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

The fact that so many Americans agree with even one of these statements means Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in whatever golf course shed Trump stashed him in after stealing his corpse and wrapping it in top secret nuclear documents like a day-old order of fish and chips.

The fact that a majority of the U.S. population still identifies as Christian does not make America a Christian nation, and it never has—any more than, say, the overwhelming prevalence of white hockey players makes the NHL the KKK.

Nope! We are a religiously diverse country with a Constitution that—in theory, at least—protects the rights of all citizens regardless of creed, and explicitly prohibits religious tests for public office.

But even though U.S. Christian nationalists have a completely (M)ass-backward view of religion’s proper place in a pluralistic liberal democracy, they nevertheless wield outsized influence. And consider the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and the ascent of Speaker Mike Johnson—who’s called the principle of church-state separation a “misnomer”: That influence only continues to grow.

Ja'han Jones, writing for MSNBC’s The ReidOut Blog, noted this out-of-whack power dynamic:

PRRI found “three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (30%).”

So adherents and sympathizers of Christian nationalism make up about 30% of the American population — and evidently about 66% of the Supreme Court bench, if the Dobbs ruling is any indicator.

In other words, because two presidents who were originally elected by a minority of voters have appointed five of our current SCOTUS justices, the majority of Americans—who would prefer to keep the country as Jefferson and James Madison envisioned—are already living under a quasi-theocracy. And Christian nationalism’s enduring popularity only promises to make this tyranny of the minority worse.

That a movement so antithetical to clearly defined and long-held American values has overtaken one of our two major parties is truly disturbing. But as this same survey makes clear, we are still the majority. Which means there’s still plenty we can do to push back, even if the game is rigged against us, thanks to the same Constitution that’s supposed to confer inalienable religious freedoms.

It starts with this November’s elections—but hopefully doesn’t end with them. After all, our own little MAGA Moses remains determined to lead us into a promised land that very few of us ever signed up for.

Needless to say, we can’t let him.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Danziger: What Would Jesus Tweet?

Danziger: What Would Jesus Tweet?

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam as a linguist and intelligence officer, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. Born in New York City, he now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

Francis Decries Holiday Commercialism, Urging World Focus On Dispossessed

Francis Decries Holiday Commercialism, Urging World Focus On Dispossessed

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis said on Saturday that Christmas had been “taken hostage” by dazzling materialism that puts God in the shadows and blinds many to the needs of the hungry, the migrants and the war weary.

Francis, leading the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics into Christmas for the fourth time since his election in 2013, said in his Christmas Eve homily that a world often obsessed with gifts, feasting and self-centeredness needed more humility.

“If we want to celebrate Christmas authentically, we need to contemplate this sign: the fragile simplicity of a small newborn, the meekness of where he lies, the tender affection of the swaddling clothes. God is there,” the Pope said at St. Peter’s Basilica.

At the solemn but joyous service, attended by some 10,000 people as well as dozens of cardinals and bishops, Pope Francis said the many in the wealthy world had to be reminded that the message of Christmas was humility, simplicity and mystery.

“Jesus was born rejected by some and regarded by many others with indifference,” he said.

“Today also the same indifference can exist, when Christmas becomes a feast where the protagonists are ourselves, rather than Jesus; when the lights of commerce cast the light of God into the shadows; when we are concerned for gifts, but cold toward those who are marginalized.”

He then added in unscripted remarks: “This worldliness has taken Christmas hostage. It needs to be freed.”

Security was heightened for the Christmas weekend in Italy and at the Vatican after Italian police killed the man believed to be responsible for the Berlin market truck attack while other European cities kept forces on high alert.

St. Peter’s Square was cleared out six hours before the mass started at the basilica so that security procedures could be put in place for those entering the church later.

Francis, who has made defense of the poor a trademark of his papacy, said the infant Jesus should remind everyone of those suffering today, particularly children.”Let us also allow ourselves to be challenged by the children of today’s world, who are not lying in a cot caressed with the affection of a mother and father, but rather suffer the squalid mangers that devour dignity: hiding underground to escape bombardment, on the pavements of a large city, at the bottom of a boat over-laden with immigrants,” he said.

Outside the basilica, thousands of people who could not get into the largest church in Christendom watched on large screens in the chilly night.

“Let us allow ourselves to be challenged by the children who are not allowed to be born, by those who cry because no one satiates their hunger, by those who do have not toys in their hands, but rather weapons,” he said.

On Christmas Day, Francis will deliver his twice-yearly “Urbi et Orbi” (“To the City and to the World”) blessing and message from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella, editing by G Crosse)

IMAGE Pope Francis greets faithful as he leads the Christmas night Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican December 24, 2016. REUTERS/Tony Gentile

Merry Christmas: The Message From The Manger

Merry Christmas: The Message From The Manger

Celebrating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a custom familiar to everyone raised in Western cultures, whether or not they happen to share the Christian faith. So important is Christmas to Americans that even the traditional holiday greeting is misused as a partisan weapon — seized by a political figure no less profane, irreligious, and insincere than Donald Trump, who proclaims he will restore its meaning.

Complaining peevishly of a mythical “war on Christmas,” the president-elect evidently believes the holiday’s most compelling aspect is the right to impose its observance on others who may not share his professed piety. In a country founded on freedom from religious coercion of any kind, Trump repeatedly promised to “assault” the domestic enemies of Christendom, which in the minds of Trump’s followers include Barack Obama and his family.  Never mind that on December 1, the president lit the National Christmas Tree in a ceremony aimed at unifying the country, regardless of faith or ethnicity, with musical stars singing carols and the first lady reading The Night Before Christmas.

For a politician who cannot correctly identify any portion of his favorite book, the Bible, such ferocious displays of piety reveal how little thought Trump has ever devoted to the real message of the Christmas story — which remains essential in a world where children, refugees, and the poor seem destined for ever greater suffering.

It is a story, not a history. The versions of the Nativity set forth in Scripture by Luke and Matthew differ in salient respects, but that should not matter to anyone who understands the difference between religious allegory and literal truth. Both those with faith and those without can find truth in the allegory, regardless of the narrative details.

Christmas tells us of a child born to a carpenter and his wife, impoverished working people living in ancient Judea, ruled by a distant dictatorial regime and its sanctioned local agents — the ruling elite of their era. Joseph and Mary were undeniably homeless and, according to one version of the story, they were refugees from political oppression, forced to migrate to another land. Rejected by society, the little family was driven into a manger — the equivalent of a cardboard shelter today — where Jesus was born in a cradle of straw amid the animals.

It is a story that we can imagine transpiring in our own time, among the Central American migrants, homeless in a California border town, or among the Syrian refugees, freezing and hungry in northern Greece. The analogy is clearly lost on politicians like Trump, who not only assure us that we need not concern ourselves with their fate, but that we must coldly spurn small children for the sake of our own comfort and safety. Almost in the same breath, these cynical hypocrites proclaim their eternal allegiance to Jesus.

The story is not a political or ideological discourse, but a parable of light delivered to a world of pain and darkness, on a date that happens to mark the winter solstice. Its infant prophet is a harbinger of universal love, an unequivocal embrace of the sinners, the impious, the unclean, the rejected, the foreigner, the stranger, the ill, and the poor. What does that story mean to leaders who spend their days deciding how to give the hungry less food, give the sick less medical care, and give the elderly less security, all for the sake of laying up still greater riches for those who are already too wealthy?

It is a story whose message pastors and theologians, not least among them Pope Francis, have reiterated every year in this season: that the spirit of God arrived on earth not clothed in power and glory, but embodied in a weak, tiny, and defenseless baby who endures cold, poverty, and rejection.

The face of that child is the face of every innocent child deprived of comfort and joy.  If only our culture warriors would declare a truce, stop angrily shouting “Merry Christmas!”  — and listen to what that child is trying to tell us.

IMAGE: Migrant children wait for the arrival of Father Christmas, with presents, at a gathering arranged by a local relief organization at a refugee camp in Hanau, Germany.