This is not satire. This really happened:
If a Christian were to post an image of Baphomet…
with a cheery “Happy Easter! He is Risen!” greeting and claim that he is just “celebrating Easter in my own way”, followed by “It is my Constitutional right to do this and you can have my Baphomet statue when you pry it out of my cold, dead hand!” normal people would regard it as an expression of insanity or a deliberate insult to Christ.
If he then devoted decades to declaring that “Evil is in the heart, not in my precious, precious Baphomet statue that I will kill you to defend” normal people would sense that there was something amiss with this person’s spiritual life.
But literally millions of American Christians think nothing of pictures of guns and crosses at Easter, or chub-cheeked families gathered around the Christmas tree with their arsenals.
.Jesus! Babies! Guns! is the creed of this idolatrous antichrist cult.
Right wing US Christianity is Moloch worship with Precious Moments figurines, sugary ChristPop music, and a dash of Latin. It serves the Prince of Darkness, not the Prince of Peace.
That is because the Religious Right, having mutated into a Theology of Narcissism and Selfishness, approaches ethics on the basis of “What’s the absolute least I have to give a shit about others and the most I can get away with in pursuit of self and still get into Heaven?” It’s their whole gig. That’s why they always frame things narcissistically.
Instead of “What can we do to stop gun violence?” in response to mass death they always start with “Don’t blame me. Don’t touch my gun!”
At the height of torture debates, the question was never “How can we protect the dignity of prisoners?” and instead was always framed as “How close can we get to torturing people without technically doing it?”
Issues involving violence are not framed as “How do we avoid violence?” or even as “When might we *have* to kill?” but as “When do we *get* to kill?” (That’s what undergirded torture apologetics: “We get to kill in war, so why don’t we get to torture?”)
Right wing theology is always, always ordered toward “How do I avoid having to care about anybody but me if I can?” and “How much selfishness can I cling to and still squeak into Heaven?” It is Minimum Daily Adult Requirement Christianity. The idea of loving God and neighbor maximally, of doing more than the bare minimum, of habitually putting the good of the other and the common good first is so far off the radar that even attempting to think in such a way is reflexively and habitually slapped away as “socialism” or “gun grabbing” or some other braindead buzzword. Right Wing Christianity is All about Me.
And its two favorite human shields for that massive theology of Narcissism are the Unborn and “I’m protecting My Family”. Every time this cult of death is challenged, they accuse you of being a “babykiller” even if, like me, you oppose abortion and always have. They lie that they amass arsenal because they care about the family, even when guns in the home vastly increase the likelihood that a family member will be killed and even though the huge cost of that arsenal hurts the family. They flatly ignore the fact that Jesus always subordinates the family to the Kingdom of God.
And they just flat lie, lie, lie to defend their fetish. A colossal amount of pure grade A selfishness is hidden behind those two shields by people who think nothing (for instance) of killing the unborn by giving their mothers COVID, incinerating the family with nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, destroying families at the border, or killing the unborn by protecting the right of butchers to murder them and their mothers and families in shopping malls.
Until Christians develop a way to call out and challenge this radical Theology of Selfishness, a thing as satanic as the Black Mass, that has grown up like a cancer in American Christianity, we can kiss our credibility goodbye.
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6 Responses
Selfishness. That’s our downfall summarized in one word. You’ve nailed it, Mark.
So how do we overcome this, personally? And, how do we inspire others to be selfless as well? These are serious questions.
Repent and believe the Good News.
You have spent a lot of time and energy how adherence to your religion doesn’t make people behave any better on this issue. So, what’s your second solution? I will note countries with no almost Christians in them, or far fewer than America don’t have this problem.
No. I’ve spent time pointing out that MAGA antichrist worshippers do not adhere to Jesus Christ in the slightest. They adhere to a schlocky aesthetic and ignore the commandments of Jesus.
That’s pretty much their approach to democracy: they want to do the bare amount possible to give themselves a plausible justification for seizing power. But in practice, they will try to enact as much voter suppression and rule rigging as they can get away with, because they’ve pretty much given up on trying to convince a majority of people to vote for them.
I’m actually fine with gun control and wouldn’t care in the slightest if guns were banned tomorrow. In fact, I would personally prefer that they were banned, but I also recognize I live in a country in which that is, for various sociological and historical reasons, extremely unlikely to happen in the forseeable future. I also come from a fairly right-wing family (at least on my dad’s side) in which even some of the more “liberal” members of the family are still probably right of center on gun issues. I disagree that they worship guns, or that their lack of support for more stringent gun control is an evidence of clinging to selfishness or trying to do only the bare minimum that they have to in order to get into Heaven. I’ve seen family members (who are ardently pro-gun) sacrificially take in their own young grandchildren and raise them, despite being in their 50s and 60s. Perhaps I’m misreading you and your blog post is targeting a specific demographic within the right-wing Christian pro-gun crowd–if so, I apologize.
I, too, take issue with uniting Christianity with guns (e.g. the viral picture of the young white gal posing with an American flag, a gun, and a Bible). I saw a hat for sale at an auction the other day that said, “Gods, Guts, and Guns” and I find it extremely problematic. I’m just skeptical that this weird attempt to blend right-wing pro-gun nationalism and Christianity is representative of what the average right-wing gun enthusiast (or the average right-wing Christian) even believes. I went to a pretty right-wing Baptist Church, in fact two of them, for years, and I don’t remember hearing anything about guns.–this was late 90s through the late double oughts.) There are some sincerely held beliefs that, even if they’re dumb beliefs, still represent kind of a bedrock of argument (though psychologically people might just be committing the fallacy of post-purchase rationalization without realizing it). A lot of people sincerely believe that a decent proportion of the population should own guns in order to empower the people in case of a despotic government taking over or the country getting overran by a foreign government. Some have pointed to Ukraine as a case in point. And while I find that an extremely convincing argument, I at least think we should take them at face value that they’re offering a sincere argument (just as we take pro-choicers at face value when they state their belief that the zygote or the blastocyst is not a human person with rights).