In honor of the first anniversary of the exploded prophecies of the MAGA cult, here’s a little piece on the legion of MAGA cranks who falsely prophecied the inauguration and ever-moving goalposts of the restoration of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2021:
Die-hard prophets began shifting their timelines backward. After President Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20, some prophets said that Trump would be restored in March. Robin Bullock, a pastor from Birmingham, Alabama, resorted to Shakespeare to prophesy that Biden would be out by the “ides of March.” Others said that the military was going to remove Biden by the end of April, at the latest, or that Trump was still president in an alternate spiritual reality taking place in heaven.
A year later, most of the prophets who made these predictions have not apologized.
Rather, they have dug down and are fighting to protect their relevance despite the massive failure of their movement to predict who would get inaugurated as the 46th president. They thrive in a political climate where nearly 1 in five Republicans believe (as of polling last month) that Trump would be reinstated in 2021.
It would be lovely for me as a Catholic to be able sit back and chuckle at yet another example of Protestant nuttery gone wrong. But exactly the same false prophetic nonsense is there in spades with MAGA Catholic antichrist worshippers, such as when Fr. Frank Pavone foretold that Trump would certainly be inaugurated–after he lost the election.
And that’s the thing. For all their zeal for getting “back to the Bible” or “getting back to Tradition”, the one thing you can be absolutely certain about with MAGA prophets who have been so wrong about so much so many times for so long is that they are not keen on this passage:
“But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?’— when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously, you need not be afraid of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:20-22)
Understand. I am neither a fundamentalist nor a Francis-hating Trad and don’t think false prophets should be killed because I believe in the development of doctrine and agree with the Church’s opposition to the death penalty.
But the MAGA antichrist cult of false prophets love the death penalty because they love killing the poor and brown and are eager to visit violent judgment on a host of victims. So they constantly appeal to Select Scriptures to call for the death of those they hate while accusing the pope of “perverting biblical tradition” when he teaches that if you don’t absolutely have to kill somebody, then don’t.
Except here, when they are demonstrably false prophets declaring lies like God’s reinstatement of Donald Trump and getting it dead wrong.
Then, suddenly, they do not volunteer to be stoned to death as the false prophets they plainly are.
It’s almost as if they are People of the Lie and not real prophets at all!
Who could have predicted it?
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6 Responses
Thank you for writing this, Mark. If anyone thinks right-winged Trump politics and conspiracy theories have only infected Evangelicalism, they can take a look no further than Fr. Frank Pavone, Fr. James Altman, and Bishop Joseph Strickland in the Catholic Church. Along with other right-winged clergymen and laity who unconditionally support Donald Trump, they collectvely cause great harm to the Church and even though the abortion rate and funding to Planned Parenthood increased under him.
There is a dangerous parallel between Trumpism and Nazism. If we don’t think White Supremacy and racism are still a problem in a country, take a look no further than January 6th. I don’t see a speck of anything but the Confederacy and White Nationalism when I watch the insurrection footage over and over again. When President Joe Biden said that White Nationalism and White Supremacy are our country’s largest domestic terrorist threats, I didn’t believe him at first. Now that I’ve seen and experienced it first-hand, he is correct and then some. God bless President Joe and Jill Biden.
Thank you for writing this, Mark. If we think right-winged Trump politics and conspiracy theories have only infected Evangelicalism, we need to take a look no further than Fr. Frank Pavone, Fr. James Altman, and Bishop Joseph Strickland in the Catholic Church. Along with other right-winged clergymen and laity who unconditionally support Donald Trump, they destroy the witness to “love thy neighbor” even at the cost of the abortion rate and funding to Planned Parenthood increasing under Trump.
There is a dangerous parallel between Trumpism and Nazism. If we don’t think White Supremacy and racism are still a problem in a country, we can take a look no further than January 6th. I don’t see a speck of anything but the Confederacy and White Nationalism when I watch the insurrection footage over and over again. When President Joe Biden said that White Nationalism and White Supremacy are our country’s largest domestic terrorist threats, I didn’t believe him at first. Now that I’ve seen and experienced it first-hand, he is correct and then some. God bless President Joe and Jill Biden.
Indeed! MAGA Catholics have lost their minds just as much as MAGA Protestants–and with far less excuse because they have a Magisterium and a Tradition to draw on that teaches them not to buy into such rubbish and, if they would but avail themselves of it, teaching them how to think with the mind of Christ and not with FOX/OAN/Alex Jones lies and nonsense.
@Mark Shea:
There is a phrase that is often said by Dr. Rashad Richey, host of the online show “Indisputable”: “Culture trumps policy. Culture will eat policy alive.” Meaning that its not just about the rules on the books, its also about how those rules are implemented and enforced. He often talks about this in the context of policing in the US, but I think its applicable to what’s been going on with a significant section of the Catholic Church as well.
The situation looks eerily similar to the article you put out a while back, that showed the ways in which the Catholic Church in the US, justified and rationalized its departure from the Vatican on the issue of slavery, in order conform to the cultural and political pressures of the time. So in that analogous fashion, for a while now we’ve observed a pattern of Catholic-affiliated institutions becoming breeding grounds and networking hubs for right-wing ideology. This symbiotic relationship seems to be working only in one direction and its driving them to the edge.
Its as if at some point, these MAGA Catholics determined that they will perpetually be on the correct side of everything, as long as they don’t stray from their chosen path, but they traverse it without ever looking up to see where they’re actually headed.
They’re focusing on the path while disregarding the terrain, and as a result, they’re blindly and confidently walking right off a cliff.
What makes a Frank Pavone a Frank Pavone?
I’d put my money on the probability that he was bullied. It’s not his fault if he was nerdy or awkward or autistic as a kid. The problem is when a very wounded, angry, vengeful person decides that they can grasp at honor, prestige and reverence simply by being ordained a priest–someone who is given the sacred duty of acting in Persona Christi.
Hopefully the psychologists that screen the men who say they have a vocation to the priesthood (or any Christian ministry for that matter!) will stop turning their heads away from the visible from space *red flags*.
Frank Pavone has always been, and is vigorously! *Frank Pavone*.
This is also why I stopped listening to Pat Robertson shortly after he predicted Bush would win in ’92–only to see Clinton win by a landslide. Yet he’s still out there predicting presidential wins that don’t happen, and people still listen to him! We’re seeing in real time how churches based on false prophecies can survive, such as the ones that predict the End of the World that doesn’t happen.