One People and One True Church?

 

So, bear with me, because Mike Flynn has spared you from my explaining why Mark Thiessen,* who employs Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason to mean something along the lines of "music critics hate music" and fumbles around his actual Golden Rule refinements to create a general code of ethics (a categorical imperative) to imply that one of the most influential philosophers of the 18th century actually meant objective reality is bullshit so just make shit up as you go along to satisfy your needs--which might describe how Thiessen became a torture apologist, but doesn't really sort out how people experiencing actual privations came to identify the source of their privations and, by means of historical review, call them out. 

But I can switch off from the obvious bad faith train of somehow MSM-published and wildly intellectually bankrupt Thiessen, the Ed Gein of anti-intellectual elites: he dresses up in the skin of intellectualism to mock it. After all, we have people willing to actually burn heresies in the form of books--a bonfire of the vanities, if you will. Why use words at all, if fire will do? Look at the willingness of so-called conservatives to burn books. This is not just because of the backlash at education because of anti-CRT astroturfing, but also because they are concerned with children being exposed to LGBT characters and history. But it has been said that where people would burn books, they would burn people. 

So what does this have to do with Mike Flynn? Mike Flynn, recently suggested that the US should exist under one God. Presumably the Christian God. What does that even mean for non-Christians in MAGAland? Mike Flynn wants Christian soldiers for his version of the future of America. Which is an America in which the 1stAmendment means nothing and military law is always around the corner. 

If you are even Josh Mandel, you can't signify your way around what Christian supremacy means. The ties of MAGA to the one true and limited franchise apostolic evangelical church of Falwell and Robertson and whatever seems pretty cohesive now. Maybe I'm the wrong person to point out how all this is wrong. Maybe. But Mike Flynn, traitor to the constitution and the republic, suggesting to be a real American means being Christian is ugly even if you have already discounted whether Mike Flynn's opinion should ever matter to you. 

Of course, Flynn isn't just using religion as a signifier of the culture war. His embrace (and probable construction) of QAnon is as an alternative religion, married to political grievance. Just as political grievance has long been married to religion on the political right.

The Q-Anon crowd is at televangelist John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio.

They are chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon” from the church pews. pic.twitter.com/pGqUmUXezn

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) November 14, 2021

We have some of the oldest and most persuasive forms of brainwashing available in the study of religious cults, and if anything, it appears that we are looking at the evolution of a syncretic movement built on lines that should be very familiar. (Flynn seems to be hunting around for elements to add with occasionally interesting results. ) But the dark side of this kind of cult creation is that there always needs to be outsiders, a Satan figure, to demonize. I don't think it's spontaneous, for example, that anti-vax and anti-mask mandate protesters have adopted a yellow star as their obnoxious badge to pretend they are the real victims. It is the kind of obvious, garish dishonesty that claims CRT is the real racism. It isn't an argument for others, but an in-group attestation of what they believe. 

*(Kant was, because of the subjective nature of the information that he had, actually extraordinarily racist, and his categorical imperative for racial justice might well have resembled the dictum of William F. Buckley that the South should hold certain people back according to their reduced perspective. This being the case, and the godlessness of Marxists being a perennial favorite bugbear of Birchers, I have no idea why he didn't just stop at CRT being Marxist. Unless he wanted to confirmthe concept of CRT as being the real racists, in the way that conservatives try to say Nazis were actually socialists, because look at the name! As if  Niehmoller was not staring them in the face the whole time: First they took the socialists? Why would socialists take themselves?)