I had the pleasure to work with a Mormon fellow. He was a super salesman and a very nice person - someone with whom you would enjoy spending a few hours waiting for a flight en route to a client. One Rosh HaShana, I think we were heading into 5778, he greeted me for the holiday and upon understanding the Hebrew year said "Ah, only 1200 years to go!" He believed that the world has a finite life of 7000 years. This gave me pause, but it had no bearing on his professional conduct or capability. It's tempting to take a cheap shot at Johnson for his similar beliefs, but Jesus might ask us to reserve judgment.
I think the judgement is Johnsons. He needs to believe it to make the Bible infallible. But he is using a Netflix documentary where the scientific analysis is centered around geology (no carbon daring, no ecological dietary study). It's like diagnosing a sickness by only listening to the lungs.
Ken, I've had occasion to be around such people in my life, and I agree they can be perfectly nice and agreeable folks in general. And if they have these weird ideas about the age of the earth and how everything began and we all got to this point, what's the harm, right? I had always hoped that these kinds of ideas could simply occupy a compartment in their minds that would ultimately be isolated from the rest of us.
The problem with that became apparent in the '00s when it became clear that the Republican Party had two major factions in support of climate change denial for distinct reasons, rendering a powerful coalition standing in the way of environmental reform. For big-business Republicans, the motivation was financial, and pushed by the fossil fuel industry. For fundamentalist Christians, accepting the reality of climate change meant validating the broad swath of what we might call the "Earth Sciences" (geology, climatology, paleontology, etc.), which would lead to conflicts with creationism. There were also abstract concerns over heretical ideas like "Earth worship", or contradiction of the Bible's alleged mandate to use the Earth as we see fit, but the attention paid to these paled in comparison to battling the theory of evolution, and all of the things like carbon dating that allowed climate scientists to develop epochal climate models spanning Earth's lifetime.
And then came Trump. At which point, yet another danger of having such an insular, epistemologically cloistered culture became apparent. Although general right wing media had a lot to do with this, fundamentalist Evangelicals, long shepherded by corrupt, wealth worshipping televangelists, proved to be a receptive constituency easily led by the endorsements of relatively few individuals тАУ and many continue to be credulously receptive to conspiracy theories pushed by trusted faith leaders. Furthermore, the life-or-death consequences of such abuse of trust proved deadly during the COVID pandemic, with pastors and other religious leaders outright promoting medical quackery and false, faith-based reassurances to their congregations.
The really amazing thing about the climate-denier alliance was that, since the fossil fuel industry openly depends upon old-earth evolution science for its business, the two alliance parties were at complete ideological odds to begin with. (I wonder how Tim Dunn and the Wilks brothers reconcile this?)
Ken, being a salesman is a different gig than being Speaker of the House. Johnson is now in the line of succession, and his beliefs are not compatible with the pluralistic society that our Founders envisioned. It's clear to me that Johnson does not believe in individual liberty, and if given the opportunity, he would use the power of the federal government to control the lives of everyday Americans.
When Tom Nichols did his take on "The Screwtape Letters" back in 2019, Screwtape was riffing about men like Johnson in part 7:
"In either case, do you see the strategy here? You take what the man values and defends, and then force him to lie about it in order to protect his sense of himself. In a very short time, you will find that he ends up caring only that he can stay near the continual narcotic of power. Without even realizing it, he will be driven by ego and by a growing fear of being found out for the hypocrite he is. Soon, it will become second nature to him to mobilize his religious beliefs as self-serving protection while the actual voice of the Enemy, if he hears it at all, will be only a dim and muffled annoyance."
So Johnson is free to believe and free to worship as he sees fit. But when that belief is weaponized in the service of obtaining political power and transforming America into a theocracy, that has to be stopped.
It pains me so much that right wing Christianists keep dropping C.S. Lewis' name. It's passages like the one you cited that show how much he would have disagreed with them. Probably, like the Bible, they've never read the Screwtape Letters or the Great Divorce. I found Lewis' works a comfort growing up in Southern Baptist Land.
Cheryl, to be clear, the excerpt I provided was written by Tom Nichols in his take on "The Screwtape Letters". Tom wrote eight installments back in the spring of 2019. I've been going through the original works letter-by-letter over the past week or so. I can't speak for Tom and can only convey my interpretation of what Screwtape was attempting to teach Wormwood. Keep in mind the context of these new letters: ostensible "Christians" and men of piety like Bill Bennett, Mike Pence, Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., and others through their lot in with an unrepentant adulterer and sociopath because they recognized they had a chance to claim power and enforce their will on the country. Think of those men when you read this passage Tom wrote in the seventh letter:
"The word тАЬbutтАЭ is your ally here. When faced with the Old ManтАЩs lavish immorality or his petty cruelty, for example, your man must say тАЬbutтАЭ and then follow it with a non-sequitur about virtue. It should become an unthinking reflex for тАЬbutтАЭ to leave your patientтАЩs lips before he even knows he has taken enough breath to form the word."
So these guys and their allies in Congress know that Trump's a piece of shit, and they don't care.
The "Old Man", in case you're wondering, has to be Trump:
"I should remind you that the Old Man is in the hands of a conclave of the most experienced demons currently serving in the High Command..."
By the way, Peter Wehner is not the first person to observe the moral degradation of the American Christian right. Mike Lofgren has written extensively about the threat of guys like Mike Johnson for the past dozen years. When someone is that far down the Fundamentalist rabbit hole, there's no reasoning with them. For them, any sort of compromise is tantamount to capitulation.
His stated belief is that separation of church and state is a misnomer. I gained a lot from the New Testament, but Jesus is not my north star in life guidance.
No, I can pass judgment on people that outright prefer to reject the evidence presented to them. This is especially true for Johnson because he wants to govern in accordance to his faith. That last bit is entirely unacceptable and completely open to mockery and ridicule.
I don't think his faith will be of much use to him, just as it was little use to Pence and others who seem to think/believe God put them in their exalted positions. One of my news feeds had a headline saying that the House has been sent home again - so much for governing.
My semi-cynical/semi-serious voice is saying: Maybe God did put them in their positions so they would show true Christian courage and fight back against the liars and seditionists in their midst. You know - just as the martyrs did in the Roman coliseums or the prophets in the Old Testament who spoke out against the rulers and kings who didn't follow God's commandments. Of course, those people ended up in prison or dead, but they did what God wanted them to do in their jobs.
I had the pleasure to work with a Mormon fellow. He was a super salesman and a very nice person - someone with whom you would enjoy spending a few hours waiting for a flight en route to a client. One Rosh HaShana, I think we were heading into 5778, he greeted me for the holiday and upon understanding the Hebrew year said "Ah, only 1200 years to go!" He believed that the world has a finite life of 7000 years. This gave me pause, but it had no bearing on his professional conduct or capability. It's tempting to take a cheap shot at Johnson for his similar beliefs, but Jesus might ask us to reserve judgment.
I think the judgement is Johnsons. He needs to believe it to make the Bible infallible. But he is using a Netflix documentary where the scientific analysis is centered around geology (no carbon daring, no ecological dietary study). It's like diagnosing a sickness by only listening to the lungs.
Ken, I've had occasion to be around such people in my life, and I agree they can be perfectly nice and agreeable folks in general. And if they have these weird ideas about the age of the earth and how everything began and we all got to this point, what's the harm, right? I had always hoped that these kinds of ideas could simply occupy a compartment in their minds that would ultimately be isolated from the rest of us.
The problem with that became apparent in the '00s when it became clear that the Republican Party had two major factions in support of climate change denial for distinct reasons, rendering a powerful coalition standing in the way of environmental reform. For big-business Republicans, the motivation was financial, and pushed by the fossil fuel industry. For fundamentalist Christians, accepting the reality of climate change meant validating the broad swath of what we might call the "Earth Sciences" (geology, climatology, paleontology, etc.), which would lead to conflicts with creationism. There were also abstract concerns over heretical ideas like "Earth worship", or contradiction of the Bible's alleged mandate to use the Earth as we see fit, but the attention paid to these paled in comparison to battling the theory of evolution, and all of the things like carbon dating that allowed climate scientists to develop epochal climate models spanning Earth's lifetime.
And then came Trump. At which point, yet another danger of having such an insular, epistemologically cloistered culture became apparent. Although general right wing media had a lot to do with this, fundamentalist Evangelicals, long shepherded by corrupt, wealth worshipping televangelists, proved to be a receptive constituency easily led by the endorsements of relatively few individuals тАУ and many continue to be credulously receptive to conspiracy theories pushed by trusted faith leaders. Furthermore, the life-or-death consequences of such abuse of trust proved deadly during the COVID pandemic, with pastors and other religious leaders outright promoting medical quackery and false, faith-based reassurances to their congregations.
The really amazing thing about the climate-denier alliance was that, since the fossil fuel industry openly depends upon old-earth evolution science for its business, the two alliance parties were at complete ideological odds to begin with. (I wonder how Tim Dunn and the Wilks brothers reconcile this?)
Very well said.
Ken, being a salesman is a different gig than being Speaker of the House. Johnson is now in the line of succession, and his beliefs are not compatible with the pluralistic society that our Founders envisioned. It's clear to me that Johnson does not believe in individual liberty, and if given the opportunity, he would use the power of the federal government to control the lives of everyday Americans.
When Tom Nichols did his take on "The Screwtape Letters" back in 2019, Screwtape was riffing about men like Johnson in part 7:
"In either case, do you see the strategy here? You take what the man values and defends, and then force him to lie about it in order to protect his sense of himself. In a very short time, you will find that he ends up caring only that he can stay near the continual narcotic of power. Without even realizing it, he will be driven by ego and by a growing fear of being found out for the hypocrite he is. Soon, it will become second nature to him to mobilize his religious beliefs as self-serving protection while the actual voice of the Enemy, if he hears it at all, will be only a dim and muffled annoyance."
https://www.thebulwark.com/the-screwtape-letters-part-7/
So Johnson is free to believe and free to worship as he sees fit. But when that belief is weaponized in the service of obtaining political power and transforming America into a theocracy, that has to be stopped.
It pains me so much that right wing Christianists keep dropping C.S. Lewis' name. It's passages like the one you cited that show how much he would have disagreed with them. Probably, like the Bible, they've never read the Screwtape Letters or the Great Divorce. I found Lewis' works a comfort growing up in Southern Baptist Land.
Cheryl, to be clear, the excerpt I provided was written by Tom Nichols in his take on "The Screwtape Letters". Tom wrote eight installments back in the spring of 2019. I've been going through the original works letter-by-letter over the past week or so. I can't speak for Tom and can only convey my interpretation of what Screwtape was attempting to teach Wormwood. Keep in mind the context of these new letters: ostensible "Christians" and men of piety like Bill Bennett, Mike Pence, Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., and others through their lot in with an unrepentant adulterer and sociopath because they recognized they had a chance to claim power and enforce their will on the country. Think of those men when you read this passage Tom wrote in the seventh letter:
"The word тАЬbutтАЭ is your ally here. When faced with the Old ManтАЩs lavish immorality or his petty cruelty, for example, your man must say тАЬbutтАЭ and then follow it with a non-sequitur about virtue. It should become an unthinking reflex for тАЬbutтАЭ to leave your patientтАЩs lips before he even knows he has taken enough breath to form the word."
So these guys and their allies in Congress know that Trump's a piece of shit, and they don't care.
The "Old Man", in case you're wondering, has to be Trump:
"I should remind you that the Old Man is in the hands of a conclave of the most experienced demons currently serving in the High Command..."
By the way, Peter Wehner is not the first person to observe the moral degradation of the American Christian right. Mike Lofgren has written extensively about the threat of guys like Mike Johnson for the past dozen years. When someone is that far down the Fundamentalist rabbit hole, there's no reasoning with them. For them, any sort of compromise is tantamount to capitulation.
ItтАЩs not the creationism that worries me.
His stated belief is that separation of church and state is a misnomer. I gained a lot from the New Testament, but Jesus is not my north star in life guidance.
I get the feeling MAGA Mike spends way more time memorizing Leviticus than reading the actual words of Jesus.
1200 years feels optimistic these days.
No one said they'd be 1200 good years.
No, I can pass judgment on people that outright prefer to reject the evidence presented to them. This is especially true for Johnson because he wants to govern in accordance to his faith. That last bit is entirely unacceptable and completely open to mockery and ridicule.
I don't think his faith will be of much use to him, just as it was little use to Pence and others who seem to think/believe God put them in their exalted positions. One of my news feeds had a headline saying that the House has been sent home again - so much for governing.
My semi-cynical/semi-serious voice is saying: Maybe God did put them in their positions so they would show true Christian courage and fight back against the liars and seditionists in their midst. You know - just as the martyrs did in the Roman coliseums or the prophets in the Old Testament who spoke out against the rulers and kings who didn't follow God's commandments. Of course, those people ended up in prison or dead, but they did what God wanted them to do in their jobs.
Literally nothing in the GOPтАЩs actions across the last 27 years tells me that this is a possibility.
Unfortunately agree. The GOP's last stand with courage ended with Nixon leaving.
Generally speaking I agree, but I make some exceptions, and the most important one is for anyone in the Presidential line of succession.