Fear the Evangelicals

 

Somber warning from Pastor John Pavlovitz about the intentions of Evangelical "conservative" Christians in American politics.

“I’ve been a pastor in the church for over two decades, much of that in predominantly white churches in the American South.

I’ve spent countless hours in church staff meetings and men’s Bible studies and youth pastor conferences.

I’ve stayed connected on social media with thousands of people still there in those churches. I read what they share and post and amplify and I know how they think and what they believe.

I need you to understand something and I say it without any hyperbole: white Evangelicals need to be stopped, now.

If the 2022 midterms elections allow Republicans to gain control of Congress, Conservative Christians will decimate this nation, and LGBTQ people, Muslims, women, people of color, and non-Christians will never have equality under the law again. We will all be at their mercy—and they will no longer have use for mercy.

This is not alarmist, sky-is-falling histrionics, it is the clear and sober forecast from someone who knows these people better than anyone. Over the last decade and a half, as my theology shifted and my beliefs grew more and more progressive, I’ve been a kind of undercover Liberal in an increasingly extremist movement, that while once relegated to minor fringe noisemakers is now at the precipice of Roman Empire-level power. They are less than two years away from having a dominance that they will wield violently and not relinquish.

I watched it all unfold from the inside:

I was at a North Carolina megachurch when Obama was elected and I saw the shift take place firsthand. I saw the fear slowly being ratcheted up and the agenda become solidified and the prejudices leveraged.

I was speaking regularly at the Billy Graham headquarters when Fox News reporters and Republicans like Sarah Palin started walking the halls with frequency.

I saw the messages at pastor’s conferences grow more incendiary and urgent, and heard the supremacist dog whistles become louder and more frequent.

While many decent people around this nation celebrated the progress of a black president and the many civil and human rights victories and gradually let down their guard—the white Conservative church set off the alarms and prepared for a holy war.

Yet, they were still a largely powerless, dying dinosaur until 2016, when Donald Trump acquired the presidency and gave the Evangelicals the perfect amoral partner to serve as the biggest bully pulpit they’ve ever had. Combine that with a fragmented Left, a general fatigue by the larger population, a ceremonial victory in Congress (thanks to Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema), and Republican attacks on voters’ rights— and we are now a hair’s breadth from the subjugation of diverse humanity here.

These are not followers of Jesus despite the trappings and window dressing. They are Jesus-less extremists: blind zealots for nothing but power. They have been conditioned by decades of polluted theology and FoxNews alternative facts to see diversity as a threat, to see progress as attacks on America, and to interpret more people being treated with dignity as oppression of white people.

Trust me when I tell you that we won’t recover from the theocracy Evangelicals are constructing once it is established. If we fail in 2022, they will have a political power that will render every election null and void, and we will never have a voice again in our lifetimes.

Women will lose autonomy over their own bodies.

LGBTQ people will have the rights to marry and adopt taken away.

People of color will be fully squeezed out of the electoral process.

Immigrants will be denied access to opportunity and refuge here.

These are not creative projections. They are precisely what Evangelicals have repeatedly stated as their intentions, and they’re closer than they’ve ever been to having a rubber stamp.

We can still stop it, though.

We just need a unity and coordination that transcends theirs.

We need a sustained, passionate, dedicated defense of humanity that rivals their relentless assaults on it.

I hear many people say they’re terrified, but being terrified alone doesn’t do anything but help these people.

Be terrified and get angry.

Be terrified and get busy.

Be terrified and go to work.

Be terrified and fight like hell.

I wish more decent people in America remembered they are among the vast majority instead of acting as if they are helpless victims of Republican Christians. We could defeat them, and we need to. We just need to stop lamenting how much damage they are doing and start doing something to oppose them.

We’ve seen this play out throughout history and we know how it ends. We know what unchecked religious extremist is capable of and we know the cost of the silence and inaction of good people. We also know what people are capable of when they refuse to accept fascism and white supremacy cloaked in the Bible and wrapped in the flag, when they fight for something inherently good together.

As someone who knows just how much these Christians have lost the plot of their faith tradition, believe me when I tell you that they cannot be allowed to steer this nation. It will not end well for the disparate people who call it home or who one day wish to.

Love and equity and diversity are in the balance.

It’s time we made a choice.

It may be the last one we get.”

Pastor John Pavlovitz

I Thought Putin Invaded Only Ukraine.

 OPINION, N Y Times, May 31, 2022, THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

'I Thought Putin Invaded Only Ukraine. I Was Wrong.

BERLIN — I’ve been writing nonstop about the Ukraine war ever since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, but I confess that it took coming to Europe and meeting with politicians, diplomats and entrepreneurs here for me to fully grasp what happened. You see, I thought Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine. I was wrong. Putin had invaded Europe.

He shouldn’t have done that. This could be the biggest act of folly in a European war since Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.

I only fully understood this when I got to this side of the Atlantic. It was easy from afar to assume — and probably easy for Putin to assume — that eventually Europe would reconcile itself to the full-scale invasion Putin launched against Ukraine on Feb. 24, the way Europe reconciled with his 2014 devouring of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, a remote slice of land where he met little resistance and set off limited shock waves.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

This invasion — with Russian soldiers indiscriminately shelling Ukrainian apartment buildings and hospitals, killing civilians, looting homes, raping women and creating the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II — is increasingly seen as a 21st-century rerun of Hitler’s onslaught against the rest of Europe, which started in September 1939 with the German attack on Poland. Add on top of that Putin’s seeming threat to use nuclear weapons, warning that any country that interfered with his unprovoked war would face “consequences you have never seen,” and it explains everything.

It explains why, practically overnight, Germany’s government dispensed with nearly 80 years of aversion to conflict and maintaining the smallest defense budget possible, and announced instead a huge increase in military spending and plans to send arms to Ukraine.

It explains why, practically overnight, Sweden and Finland abandoned more than 70 years of neutrality and applied for membership in NATO.

It explains why, practically overnight, Poland gave up playing around with pro-Putin, anti-immigrant populist Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, and opened its borders to more than two million Ukrainian refugees while also making itself into a crucial land bridge to funnel NATO arms into Ukraine.

It explains why, practically overnight, the European Union threw off years of baby-step economic sanctions on Russia and fired a precision economic-sanctions missile right into the center of Putin’s economy.

In sum, what I thought was just a Russian invasion of Ukraine has become a European earthquake — “an awakening — boom! — and then everything changed,” as Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, put it to me. “The status quo ante will not come back. You are seeing a huge change in Europe in response to Russia — not based on American pressure, but because the threat perception of Russia today is completely different: We understand that Putin is not talking about Ukraine alone, but about all of us and our way of freedom.”

Whether we like it or not, added Fischer, modern Europe is now in a “confrontational mode with Russia. Russia is no longer part of any European peace order.” There’s been “a complete loss of trust with Putin.”

Is there any wonder why? Putin’s army is systematically destroying Ukrainian cities and infrastructure with the seeming intent not to impose Russian rule on these towns, communities and farms but rather to erase them and their residents from the map and make true by force Putin’s crackpot claim that Ukraine is not a real country.

At the Davos World Economic Forum last week, I interviewed Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, Ukraine, the town where Russia stands accused of murdering scores of civilians and leaving their bodies on the streets to rot, or piled into a mass grave in a churchyard, before the Russian troops were driven out.

“We had 419 peaceful citizens murdered in multiple ways,” Fedoruk told me. “We had no military infrastructure in our town. People were defenseless. The Russian soldiers stole, they raped and they drank. … I am really surprised that this is happening in the 21st century.”

If that was the “shock” phase of this war — and it is still going on — the “awe” phase is something I detected among European officials in Davos and Berlin. To put it bluntly, while the United States of America seems to be coming apart, the United States of Europe — the 27 members of the European Union — have stunned everyone, and most of all themselves, by coming together to make a fist, along with a number of other European nations and NATO, to stymie Putin’s invasion.

You could almost feel E.U. officials saying: “Wow, did we make that fist? Is that our fist?”

Since February, the E.U. has imposed five packages of sanctions against Russia — sanctions that not only badly hurt Russia but are also costly for the E.U. countries in terms of lost business or higher raw material costs. A sixth package, agreed to on Monday, will cut some 90 percent of E.U. oil imports from Russia by the end of this year while also ejecting Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, from SWIFT, the vital global banking messaging system.

Maybe the most impressive thing is how many Ukrainian refugees E.U. nations have been willing to house without much complaint. There is an awareness that Ukrainian menfolk are fighting to defend them, too, so the E.U. nations can at least house their women, children and elderly.

“They are being given the same health care, childhood allowances and education that Poles are,” Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s prime minister, told me. “Why not? They are working and paying taxes. The only thing they don’t have is the right to vote.”

Putin thought the E.U. would quickly splinter under his pressure, added Morawiecki, “but Putin was wrong. Europe is now much more united than before the Ukraine war.”

Putin, observing all of this, must be asking himself: “Is that a fist I see coming at me from the E.U.? Can’t be! No, wait … it is! What’s going on here! I thought I had Germany in my pocket — bought and paid for with my cheap gas. I never dreamed they’d rally to Ukraine this way and see my invasion of Ukraine as an attack on all of them.”

But that’s exactly what happened. Still, many in the E.U. are asking how long they will be able to maintain this painful fist. It is a legitimate question.

“Putin is counting on the fatigue of the West,” Morawiecki said. “He knows that he has much more time because democracies are less patient than autocracies.”

It’s true. Some E.U. leaders are already encouraging President Biden to call Putin and explore terms of a cease-fire. Putin’s forces in eastern and southern Ukraine are now out-pummeling the Ukrainian Army at various strategic junctions, volleying round after round of rockets and heavy artillery. They don’t need to be accurate; they just need to overwhelm the Ukrainian forces with their sheer volume.

I hope the Ukrainians can hold their ground long enough for more advanced Western arms to arrive to even the fight and for the E.U. sanctions on Russia to really hurt, so that Ukrainians have real leverage with Putin in any negotiated settlement.

That said, though, I could not help but notice another theme that has run through my conversations here. It is a conviction that because this is so much Putin’s war, and because the barbarism of his forces in this war has been so criminal, as long as Putin remains in power in Moscow it will be very difficult to trust Russia on anything regarding Ukraine.

I heard no one advocate regime change, but I also heard no one say the West could return to any normalcy with Russia without it. All of which is to say something very big with Putin got broken here, and that is going to be a problem when we do move to the negotiating table — as long as Putin leads Russia. But Putin is a problem for the Russian people to deal with, not us.'