Conservative Christians desperately want to *feel* oppressed. They know they live the life of Riley in America while other Christians in other countries really are oppressed and they want some of that sweet stolen valor.
Meanwhile, in this country they *are* the oppressors of other–brown and poor–Christians and they feel the guilt of that. They are the ones who cheer as Haitian Christians get ridden down at the border. They are the ones who thought Trump’s sadistic policies of family separation directed at desperate brown Christians at the border were so awesome. They are the ones who thought spitting in the faces of Amazonian Catholics and desecrating their statue of Our Lady of the Amazon was fantastic. Conservative American MAGA Christians *love* sadistic cruelty and persecution of other Christians–not to mention of other varieties of humans they hate. So they double down on feeling oppressed because that is easier than facing their sins and repenting.
The trouble is, actual persecution against them is rare as hen’s teeth in the US, so they have to work hard to come up with ways to feed the feeling of persecution.
Since the start of the Pandemic, the MAGA Cult has worked hard to paint themselves as victims of persecution, including comparing having to abide by common courtesy and basic public health protocols to being Holocaust victims:
Nor is Greene a one-off. The Cult has gone nuts for this phony victim-martyr narrative:
That last guy, a plump Republican from my state, demonstrates as much as any of these ridiculous attempts at martyr cosplay that the only suffering these guys experience is having to wait in line at the Royal Fork. But they love them some fake Holocaust mystique.
Yet even while they are busy pretending to identify with people murdered for their ethnicity–and particularly their Jewish ethnicity–they also looooove them their Nazi vice signaling, their eugenics chatter, and their white supremacist code language, from “Jewish Space Lasers”:
to straight up appeals to race rhetoric (and, weirdly, Harry Potter Villainy):
…the MAGA cult simultaneously tries to play both Victim-Martyr and Member of the Master Race cards.
And that includes one-time Catholic Answers Live hosts who have decided that it is better to lose his soul if he can gain minor MAGA shock jock celebrity:
You may ask yourself “How can these people simultaneously 1) pretend to be victims of a mass-murdering ideology as kind people try to protect them from a disease, 2) proudly identify with that mass-murdering ideology while claiming to be “prolife”, and 3) regard themselves as the Real Victims while laboring to kill 3/4 of a million people in the US alone?”
The key is that sin makes you stupid, and pride–which swells the MAGA soul like the Hindenburg–is the gravest sin of them all. There’s a reason Paul speaks of the “mystery of evil”. Sin, in the end, does not make sense. Expecting to make sense of a subculture that has given itself to being nihilist, irrational People of the Lie is a doomed project. These are people who have abandoned reason and truth for raw, nihilist power at any price.
And as His Absymsal Under-Secretary Screwtape points out, “To get a man’s soul and give him nothing in return–that is what truly gladdens the heart of Our Father Below”. So this is the reward the devil is giving the Cult for the slavish devotion to mindless spite:
Meanwhile, Jesus struggles to save even these spiteful sadists and bring them to repentance and if even one of them repents, there is still more rejoicing in Heaven over them than over 99 who do not need to repent.
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6 Responses
They think that in ten years time while the rest of us are dying of vaccine-related illness they will be hunted down for their coveted “pure” blood and sperm.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading about all of the common health products that were developed using fetal cells lines –things like simple headache medicine. The puritans say “I’d never partake!” –when a simple Google search would reveal how they already have.
I wonder if Cardinal Burke thinks being on a ventilator for a week was worth the soap box he stood on. (I’m reminded of the anti vaxers I know who brought 10 kids with Pertussis to World Youth Day.) Burke asked the people who prayed rosaries for his recovery to keep praying because he still can’t breathe normally. He may never recover. Ventilators are brutal on the lungs. He can offer it up like a good old run of the mill Catholic, but it is food for thought about how many of the crosses we bear can be traced to the proud and foolish choices we have stubbornly made for ourselves.
When a priest that I know who is very advanced in age travelled from the east coast with Covid, was brought to the ER here, I can only imagine the scandal it caused and what it prompted the staff to think and say about the common sense of the ones who are supposed to have the gifts of the Holy Spirit enlightening their advice and choices. It is a black eye for the church, and another PR failure. Those seem to be so plentiful these days.
jj
Remember decades ago when they seized upon the racist things Margaret Sanger brazenly said about the people she considered undesirable? She said something disgusting about the brown people “teeming”, “swarming”, and “multiplying” like a disease that needed to be extinguished.
Well last month, one of the precious feet people who used to picket the aburtuary in our town used some of the exact same words for Haitians at the Southern border.
Honestly? I never quite believed in their motivation for being there. It was about culture wars and messiah complexes. Thankfully there were some quiet and honest exceptions who put their money and personal space on the line to help others,
>So they double down on feeling oppressed because that is easier than facing their sins and repenting.
In their view they are oppressed. The mistake you are making here is assuming that they are the your equals and equal to everyone else. They do not consider themselves equal to others.
They are born to rule. Every whim and fantasy of theirs must prevail; they rule and their subjects obey. For rulers, there is no constraints on their power. Their rule implies that their “whim” and “fantasy” prevails, in the literal sense of those words; Oh, it could happen that sometimes their whims align with “reason” or be “benevolent” to their subjects, but it’s still their whim when that occurs. So when their “whim” does not prevail, they are not ruling. Instead, there is a higher power ruling over them, and by definition they are now subjects of that higher power, and hence oppressed by that higher power ruling them.
I do not think that “conservative Christians” in this country are all aligned with the lunatic minority you list here. But the sensible majority of “conservative Christians” still buy into the “benevolent dictatorship” of Christian rule. They _must_ have the worldly power, but they believe that they will use power wisely, rather than in a lunatic way. There exists this benevolent majority that silently yearns for “give us worldly power, and we’ll establish the kingdom of God on earth, of peace and goodwill, milk and honey”
In that regard, the lunacy is a distraction. It hides the reality that benevolent majority is fully aligned with the loony minority on the necessity to rule, on not giving up worldly power. The underlying moral crisis is the “benevolent” majority’s thirst for power, and not the lunacy of the minority. This perception that they are the elect and above everyone else, that hence they are rulers (wise or lunatic) is common, and extends beyond the lunatic fringe
Christians have shown throughout history that whenever they are put to the third temptation, they will chose power, and in that regard are no different from any of the pagans. To be more specific, Christian clergy, and bishops have unfailingly throughout history, chose to do the opposite of what Christ chose. And 100% of the time, Christians have shown that their “benevolent” reign is not that different from any of the pagan reigns.
Power corrupts and Christians are no exception to that.
“Meanwhile, in this country they *are* the oppressors of other–brown and poor–Christians and they feel the guilt of that.”
I don’t think they feel any guilt at all on that or any other of their actions. The essence of MAGA Christianity is pure sociopathy and narcissism. Even those who were born with neural circuitry that enables empathy, they have spent their entire lifetime disabling it and taking it offline, and it rarely ever comes back in those case.
To the MAGA mind, “people” are just animated meat machines who either have a use in furthering what they want or stand as obstacles to that.
Have you ever noticed that when MAGA folks talk about the pandemic in any capacity that the reality of 700,000 dead doesn’t even faze them in the slightest? They sleep like babies on that number, and they would if it was 7 million or 70 million, or 70% of the country dead from the disease. If it’s not them, it’s not a concern.