Katie Britt has arisen from deep, prayerful reflection on her disaster of a SOTU response to double down on the lie that she didn’t lie about the sexual abuse she called out (the account of the abuse she heard was real, but the abuse itself happened in Mexico during the GWB administration, not during the Biden administration, something she was at a minimum crystal unclear about). I thought the Guardian headline captured it well: Katie Britt defends sex trafficking story she falsely links to Biden presidency.
Anyway, yeah, nobody’s buying her bullshit excuses except perhaps her fellow evangelicals, and why is that? I think it’s because lying is so baked into their game that they expect it, tolerate it, and find comfort in it. Their church experience is full of lies, and I’m not talking about the belief in some benevolent sky prince as described in their fairytale bible. Rather, it’s the other shit that they swallow all day. “We love everyone” except trans and gay folks, and sluts who use birth control and/or have abortions. (Of course, they use birth control and have abortions, in the closet, just as many of them are gay or bi, in the closet.) “We live chaste, virtuous lives” except for their clergy, who are forever being found sticking their dicks in kids and women who aren’t their wives. “We tithe for the greater good” which includes lining the pockets of their leadership. They are also brought up to seek coded messages in the main text of their faith, since that’s the only way to make sense of a bunch of disjointed rambling assembled over hundreds of years from disparate sources.
I think there are a fair number of evangelicals who live their faith and won’t vote for Trump, but for every one of them, there are ten who find him a familiar, comforting presence. He’s a leader who molests women and is notoriously unfaithful to his wives (just like their preachers). He rips off his followers, fucks them over with scammy shit like golden sneakers and generally treats them as marks, just as they are treated in their megachurches. He’s full of coded messages and wink-wink, again, something they hear every day. It’s no mystery why these people flock to Trump, when you take a clear-eyed look at what happens in their churches.
I believe that what I’ve expressed here is pretty much commonly acknowledged truth about a lot of evangelicals, but because they have “beliefs”, the media (which they despise and would destroy the minute they’re in power) treats them with kid gloves. These fuckers have burrowed themselves far too deeply into our society already, and we need to start seeing them as the threat they are. They’re un-American because they would burn the Constitution as soon as they’re in power, they’re un-Christian, in the sense of following the teachings of Christ, and they are a god damned menace to civil society with their church school ignorance and anti-vaxxism. Katie did us all a service with her Stepford wife performance (more on that from Cheryl Rofer, well worth reading). She reminded us that she, and her kind, are the enemy, and it’s good to remember that.
War for Ukraine Day 746: A Brief Sunday Night Update
JPL
The mom and wife spends most of her time in Washington DC and there is nothing wrong with that. In order to have the position she does, she probably employs outside help. Let’s not pretend that she is home stirring a tea cup or making cookies.
Baud
I wonder how many times people need to see them for what they really are before they’ll grudgingly admit that we were right along.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: n + 1 for any value of n.
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
I just don’t see that ever happening. Admitting it would cost them too much of their self regard.
Odie Hugh Manatee
The Venn diagram for white nationalism, Ku Klux Klan, fascism, conservatives and evangelicals is a circle. These are not Christians, these are wolves barely dressed as sheep. They hate unlike real Christians and they thrive on it. They are not interested in the Constitution except to abuse it like they do the bible, interpreting it in ways to bend it to their will.
They must be called out and opposed every single day. These people are not honorable, nor are they trustworthy. They are bald-faced liars and that is why they love Trump. He’s the king of liars.
laura
@Baud: Sunk cost fallacy…for jesus.
laura
@Odie Hugh Manatee: these people would pay cash money to nail Christ to the cross.
Omnes Omnibus
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Wolves are social animals and work cooperatively. They are much better people than the GOP could hope to be.
Miki
@laura: “these people would pay cash money to nail Christ and watch Christ being nailed to the cross.”
Fixed.
Baud
@laura:
Fixed.
cope
Thank you for this, well said. And we are supposed to be a species that will leave this planet and spread out through the solar system/galaxy/universe? Good luck with that.
ColoradoGuy
The GOP has been ad-agency driven since the late Forties. Their specialty is demographic analysis, since they have few principles other than raw power, and how to get it.
Nixon and his Madison Avenue henchmen saw the evangelicals as the most gullible and most tolerant of lying of any US demographic. They focus-group tested the most emotional issue back in the Seventies, and found abortion as the one that worked. This was the wedge that shattered the movement towards the Equal Rights Amendment, and became part of the Reagan Alliance of NRA gun nuts, Ayn Randers, and Southern Evangelicals.
The GOP doesn’t have “issues” as such, unlike a normal political party. Instead, it’s a quasi-religious cause around carefully selected focus-group tested issues. Trump accurately saw the GOP as the most gullible and emotional demographic in the whole country, and tailored his message to whatever got the biggest response. As a lifelong con man, he was more effective at this than the ad-men the GOP had traditionally employed.
The GOP since Gingrich has merged its message with the evangelical leadership style … dishonest to the core, but very effectively tailored to their demographic.
Paul M Gottlieb
One thing that survey after survey has revealed is that the “Evangelicals” who most fervently support Trump almost never go to church. In most cases they don’t even belong to a local church. They have abandoned the entire idea of Christian Fellowship so that they can be part of an rage-filled cult. their
hells littlest angel
I will never not be astonished that people’s “beliefs” — what they assert to be true because they assert it to be true — is something that anyone is obliged to respect. “Beliefs” are the most indefensible and insignificant ideas in any human mind.
Paul M Gottlieb
@hells littlest angel: The only thing more convincing than intense belief is intense belief and a gun
Odie Hugh Manatee
@laura:
They would auction off the hammer and nails to the highest bidder and then sell tickets to the crucifixion. Can’t forget about the trinkets and weird flags to sell at the show either.
They worship cash and power over others, that’s it.
hells littlest angel
@Paul M Gottlieb: You can get a lot more converts with a passionate sermon and a scam than you can with just a passionate sermon.
Jeffro
“If I say it, think it, or feel it…why, it must be true” – every Republican, everywhere.
How this strand of Homo sapiens managed to continue along with the rest of us, given their utter inability to self-correct, absolutely blows my mind.
Jeffro
@Paul M Gottlieb:
absolutely true
utterly disgusting
“Jesus…and his soshulist teachings…well, they just weren’t doing it for me anymore. ‘Love thy neighbor’? Oh I don’t think so…not if that neighbor is gay, brown, trans, or whomever Fox is telling me to hate at the moment.”
BellaPea
I laughed out loud when I saw the headline–one of my favorite Steely Dan albums ever! As I have lived in the South most of my life, I have been surrounded by these people. I have worked with them. And most of them are the most vicious gossips, liars, cheaters, and hypocrites you can imagine. My late grandmother and mother-in-law were the most sincere Christians I have ever known, and they were nothing like these so-called “evangelicals.”
hells littlest angel
You know, a crackpot.
Nukular Biskits
BINGO!
If only the media treated conservative evangelical Christianity/Christian nationalism/dominionism as it treats “radical Islam”.
IMHO, it represents the same existential threat to individual liberties and freedom.
Jeffro
@hells littlest angel: “I tell
Jesustrump who I hate, and he tells me ‘it’s ok…I hate them too. you’re still awesome!’ “karen marie
@JPL: “Probably employs outside help”? She absolutely does. She was not “just a housewife” before she ran for the senate. She was an aide to Senator Shelby and worked as a lobbyist. Her children have never had a “stay-at-home mom.”
Nukular Biskits
Interesting that mistermix brought this up.
I happen to follow Donna Ladd, CEO of the Mississippi Free Press on Twitter and she reposted a tweet by Matthew Dowd about the very subject of Christian nationalism.
The responses are … telling.
Hoodie
@Odie Hugh Manatee: You know, let’s not even bother to get into what is or is not real Christianity or WWJD discussions. It’s impossible to know what part (if not all) of that story was made up by a bunch of people engaged in lot of the same kind of tactical lying we witnessed with Britt.
Tony Jay
Another name needs to be appended to these cultist freaks. They’re not ‘Evangelical’. They’re not evangelising anything. They don’t make converts, they just want to get off on the power fantasy of enforcing obedience to their whims on everyone else.
Christian Dominationists comes close, but I think that’s a real insult to actual Christians who get credit for doing good in the name of their sky fairie, even if said sky fairie is just a melange of prehistoric explanations for why thunder rolls and rain falls and all the credit for good deeds actually belongs to the good people performing them.
So, no, they don’t get to call themselves Evangelicals. They’re just Dominationists, and people like that need to be treated like any other armed, reactionary cult with a political wing.
Chetan Murthy
@Tony Jay: Some wag coined “Talibangelicals”.
Nukular Biskits
@Tony Jay:
I interchangeably use “Christians” (including the quotes) and Christianists.
Chief Oshkosh
Just think, for a long moment, just reflect quietly, for three heart beats, on the level of depravity, on the level of absolute horror, on the level of complete otherness from the human condition, that is at play, that is functioning, that it “takes,” to use the story of this abused, tortured, but ultimately triumphant woman, in a lie to further the goals of the most base, worthless, and degraded group of people to ever hold positions of power.
In a just, kind world, Britt would be surrounded by patient, empathetic professionals who work together to treat her psychosis.
bbleh
PREACH!
He’s full of coded messages and wink-wink, again, something they hear every day.
And yes, exactly this. It’s why he expresses a “deeper truth” and you need to listen to him “seriously, not literally.”
They know what he is and who he is and what he’s saying. The real lie here is, for all their VERY PUBLIC and VERY PIOUS “beliefs,” they outwardly DENY their true beliefs, mostly because they know most people would condemn them, but also because, at least for some of them, something somewhere inside is nagging them a little that maybe not all is quite right with the misogyny and the racism and the violence and the fraud and the crime and so on.
bbleh
@Nukular Biskits: yes, “Christianists,” like “Islamist” terrorists. They adopt the form — very consciously and publicly — without any of the substance. See also Matthew 6:1-5.
karen gail
I was dragged screaming and kicking as a teenager into one of those cults; since it was the early 1960’s showing up in gym class with massive bruises elicited no response from adults.
Children are trained not taught how to behave, their “child rearing” booklets were and still are guidelines for systemic abuse. (Any one who watched the Duggars saw first hand their “blanket” training of infants, left out was the punishments received.) Girls were usually subject to greater levels of abuse; I remember hearing “sermons” on proper way to correct children. A boy would receive one “swat” for “crime” while a girl who did the same thing would receive 10. A girl who didn’t fit the mold was often called “demon possessed and parents were encouraged to be lavish with punishment; as a teen I complained that I was beaten bloody and was told to be thankful that parent “loved” me enough to correct me, while our social worker asked me what I had done to deserve punishment.
In today’s society few social workers would have the same attitude, but the mentality of the “christian cult” hasn’t changed. For those women who speak in that “fundy voice” I end up wondering how many learned that voice to avoid punishment. In many fundamentalist groups women are still “punished” and trained. So many males still believe they are the authority to which women and children must “happily” and “joyfully” submit.
Lee H
@BellaPea: One of mine as well. Steely remains relevant…
Hoodie
@Tony Jay: No, they really are evangelical. It’s not surprising that many of them are increasingly unchurched because modern mainline protestant churches had accepted ecumenism, that their faith is limited to their communities and that other people can have beliefs other than theirs and still be politically legitimate.
brantl
@Chief Oshkosh:
Well, after someone kicks the crap out of her, for lying like a psychopath.
Ruckus
@hells littlest angel:
A person can stand in front of a mirror and convince themselves that they are the most handsome or most beautiful, smartest, wealthy person alive, and of course that does not make that in any way true. But some humans are like that. What’s the old saying, “It takes all kinds.” It mostly does but the more people alive and the more we have gotten to easier ways to do all the living stuff, there will be more people that don’t actually do anything positive whatsoever in helping humanity survive – and often they really don’t have to because survival doesn’t require as much effort as it did 16-18 decades ago. And that level of effort went down 8-9 decades ago. And it is down today. It might even go down more in another 8-9 decades. It might go down less each segment of time but still it isn’t as hard because the work is not the same as it was when I was born in the first half of the last century. Doing what I did for over 60 yrs for work, making things out of metal, has gotten a lot different, a lot easier and a lot more precise and I’d bet that it will continue to do so, just maybe not at the same rate. The last machine work I did had a tolerance of +/- 25 millionths of an inch. That is just a tad smaller than what was even possible from when I started, 60+ yrs ago. It wasn’t difficult 2 yrs ago, it will be less difficult at some time in the future.
Bill Arnold
@Tony Jay:
“Christian Supremacists”, maybe.
The very first clause of the very first amendment in the bill of rights in the USA Constitution is “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, “
matt
Her extremely rehearsed, artificial tone made her hard to listen to.
matt
@Jeffro: Reminds me of my favorite Cormack McCarthy – Child of God.
Chetan Murthy
@matt: god, it was like fingernails dragged across a chalkboard. I could only listen for a couple of minutes before I had to shut it down.
NotMax
Tony Jay
“They [the orthodox] are so wrapt up in prejudice, that they don’t care if men all go to hell, if they won’t be saved exactly according to their notions.”
– Jedediah Burchard
.
coin operated
Having been on a cruise this last week, I wasn’t paying close attention to politics. My first indication that someone had Rubio’d the SOTU response was catching Scarlett Johansson’s SNL cold open Saturday night. From there, I went back and saw Katie Britt’s performance and WOWZERS!
My first thought was…someone needs an intervention.
Xavier
“lying is so baked into [evangelicals] game”
The definition of a religion is “a system of beliefs that requires adherents to accept at least one or two preposterous things as true.”
WaterGirl
@karen gail: I’m very sorry you went through that. It’s just sick.
bbleh
@brantl: arguably that could be a form of therapy, as long as it’s done with a healing attitude.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: I usually call this group conservative evangelicals and leave it at that. Although I sometimes call them bible thumpers as in, “the bible thumpers and the tea party cranks double-teamed the Chamber of Commerce types in the 20q4 VA07 Republican primary.” I’m mainly concerned with voting behavior, not ideology.
But nomenclature can be a fraught subject here. Some people get really strung out about the proper terminology used to describe scary and/or despised groups.
mrmoshpotato
Let’s not forget the highest bidder being allowed to pierce Jesus’s side.
cain
@Paul M Gottlieb: So like all fascists they’ve taken over anything good – religion is not even important it’s all virtual signaling. Whatever it takes to get people angry and violent.
FelonyGovt
@karen gail: That’s monstrous. I hope you have been able to find some peace as an adult.
Tony G
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Yes. The love and worship Trump (and others like Trump) because Trump is exactly like them, but with power. Being an Italian-American in New Jersey, I don’t have much contact with Evangelicals, but the same is true of right-wing Catholics. The difference with the Catholics, from my perception, is that plenty of the “faithful” are cafeteria-Catholics who show up at Mass once in a while but who ignore some of the crazier Church doctrines. The lesser of two evils.
RSA
We’re all familiar with the concept of white lies. A few years ago I learned about the concept of blue lies. Some people even feel virtuous telling lies.
catclub
I will say “here we go again with authoritarian followers.” Go read the book; “The Authoritarians”
The most frequent authoritarian followers were raised in some version of a strict patriarchal Christian denomination.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: Non believers went from statistically none existent in US society in 2000 to 29% of the population today.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@mrmoshpotato:
And auctioning off the spear afterward as a collectible. Same with the cross…
@Tony G:
Thoroughly lapsed RC and unmolested altar boy here (I was the ugly kid, yay!). I agree. I call them Convenience Catholics too. They’re Catholic when it’s convenient and sin their asses off the rest of the time.
Shalimar
@karen marie: Katie Britt also ran the Business Council of Alabama for a few years. She wasn’t just a staffer. Britt has been one of the best messaging people in Alabama for over a decade. She’s the type of person who wrote the speeches and made sure they were perfect. This is not a person who reads what others write for her. I would bet money she was the primary author of her speech.
karen gail
I believe my experience has given me some insight into the mindset of trump cult; especially, after discovering many of those who were once with the cult was exposed to are now part of the orange man cult. If a person has been raised inside of the bubble that encloses both Britt and Johnson they have no idea that there is a life outside of that bubble; the divide between “us” and “them” is so great that their minds would break rather than accept that they might be wrong.
Regnad Kcin
@Baud: these people would aggressively fundraise off this into PACs that had nothing whatever to do w Jesus, crosses, nails, or weeping mothers, while never bearing the slightest of witness to the actual crucifixion
opiejeanne
@karen gail: We were at a birthday brunch with our kids and their spouses today, and compared notes about out-of-state relatives who called in a panic to make sure they were safe during the Seattle riots. They were convinced that Seattle had burned to the ground and couldn’t wrap their head around the idea that Seattle was not a pile of ashes, completely destroyed and the ones I fielded calls from couldn’t understand why I was so calm about this since two of my kids live there.
The callers all have one thing in common: they watch Fox religiously..
Slightly_peeved
@laura:
A lot of these people had grandparents who showed up to public lynchings, so a crucifixion wouldn’t be much of a stretch
karen gail
@opiejeanne: It is a mindset that didn’t start with Fox; it fed on Rush and dictators. I have no idea what the roots of this type of mindset are but wouldn’t be surprised to find it was active during the days of Roman Empire.
RevRick
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Today’s Evangelicals are the descendants of those who vociferously defended slavery, advocated for secession and Civil War, and supported Jim Crow and its violence. They are what you get when Calvinism makes a bargain with the devil.
When Baptists first traveled south down the Ridge and Valley region, they had great success in the upcountry. And initially, they were critical of the institution of slavery, but that was intolerable to the planter aristocracy. Essentially, the planters told the Baptists to shut up about slavery (or else), but if they did, the planters would grant them full authority to police personal conduct, and would welcome them into their areas. But this created an unstable theological situation.
The dynamics of Calvinism is that we are infected with the desire to improve (ourselves and society). Which means we are busybodies who create all sorts of programs/agencies to change the world (the antebellum north was rife with volunteer associations), but it also means we are busybodies (who enact blue laws).
Calvinism is like a chemical reaction which has an unstable intermediate state and will eventually end up in a new form. Northern Calvinism created the fertile ground that is home to the modern Democratic Party and its impulses to build a more just society. Southern Calvinism, in making its deal with slavery, had to create a new theology of frozen social relations, a way of interpreting scripture that justified its deal. If slavery is okay, then all social hierarchies are okay… no more than okay: they’re mandated by God. This warped theology has produced a region of warped people, who are taught to hammer their humanity into the box of constraint.
It’s no surprise that the South is infested with all sorts of social disorders: more divorce, alcoholism, gun violence, teen pregnancy. It’s no surprise that Southern white Evangelicals express more prejudice against blacks and other minorities. Normal human expression gets defined as sinful and the internal repression needed to suppress normal human behavior inevitably warps everyone.
Northern Calvinism, which came to these shores with the beliefs that since only God is sovereign, no prince, priest or thrall could claim sovereignty over the individual conscience, and that God had yet more light and truth to pour forth from God’s word, has led to a world where huge swaths have rejected the church altogether. Every atheist, agnostic, every person of no particular belief is, in a sense, a child of Calvinism.
Citizen Alan
@BellaPea: 2016 proved to me conclusively that the overwhelming majority of Evangelical Christians actually worship the Devil but are either to ashamed to admit it or two ignorant to realize it.
Citizen Alan
@hells littlest angel: Somewhat amusingly, it reminds me of when Evangelicals used to mock non-churchgoing liberals who answered questions about religious faith by claiming to be “spiritual.”
Chetan Murthy
@RevRick: That’s an interesting way to analyze what happened in the North! I’d never seen it, and lots of food for thought. It certainly explains how the busybodies of Massachusetts who were burning witches could end up the decent folk of today. And for sure, I buy your argument about what happened in the South. The town I grew up in had blue laws in the 70s, and was dry as long as I can remember (though Googling, it seems it’s only partly dry today — gosh maybe the kids aren’t all driving to The County Line (eponymous liquor store) and dying on the way back anymore).
Citizen Alan
@RSA: I distinctly remember at the age of 11 having to watch a movie along with the other kids in our church. It was called Heavenly Deception, and it was an indie Christian film meant to warn us about the dangers of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies). The title came from something said by one of the cult leaders to the main character (a Christian drawn into the Moonies who later escapes) after the character learns that the church leaders are knowingly lying in the media about something or other. It is both hilarious and horrifying to me that Evangelicals have openly embraced that attitude towards morality today.
Citizen Alan
@RevRick: This. The modern Southern evangelical churches literally only exist because antebellum slave-owners wanted preachers who would reassure them that God was perfectly fine with them raping their slave girls and then sending the resulting bastard children at the auction block for a tidy profit.
AlaskaReader
For one whose beliefs and ideologies are founded on lies,
…it is anathema, even heretical, to examine any truth which originates outside their lies.
ChristoFascists, and many other religious sects, have backed themselves into an impasse of their own making which forces them to invent ever more ludicrous fantasies to prop up their continuing denial of truth.
It’s no wonder they want control so as to bring on their hoped for ‘Rapture’,
…the endless contradictions surely drives them batty.
jimmiraybob
@Odie Hugh Manatee: “These are not Christians, these are wolves barely dressed as sheep. They hate unlike real Christians and they thrive on it.”
I asked a Pastor friend of mine (UCC) if acting in a manner that is the antithesis of the Christ was, in fact, the AntiChrist of the Bible and without hesitation he said yes.
To admit they are wrong is to demonstrate humility. I rest my case.
BellyCat
@RevRick: Fascinating.
jimmiraybob
@karen gail:
@RevRick:
“The dynamics of Calvinism is …”
The more I study 17th century British colonial America, especially in New England, the more I recognize what’s happening today.
The Puritans and Pilgrims, extreme Calvinists, fled Great Britain and Europe to establish Dominion in a new land where they wouldn’t be constrained in their extremism. They established rigid theonomic governments and you either towed the line or else. And “or else” could be banishment to the wilderness or persecution as a witch. This is the “America” that they are always clamoring about going back to.
lowtechcyclist
@Citizen Alan:
50 years ago, the belief among Christians who believed the Rapture wasn’t far off was that many Christians would be seduced by the Antichrist.
Back then, of course, they had Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants in mind. Now they can’t even see that it’s their own selves.
jimmiraybob
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams (1823):
“It would be more pardonable to believe in no God at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.”
Northern Calvinism evolved from the Pilgims and Puritans (fundamentalist literalist) to much more the Church of England and deist agnosticism by the time of 1776-1789.
RevRick
@jimmiraybob: Calvinists were never literalists to begin with. They saw scripture as a dynamic force to be interpreted and reinterpreted in light of new understanding. On the European continent they identified themselves as the Reformed Church, and their slogan was “Reformed, but ever in need of reformation.”
It’s only when they encounter black peoples, either enslaved in the South or as foes in South Africa, that they became the twisted version you are acquainted with.
Chris Johnson
@Tony Jay: I mean, aren’t there literally some of them called Dominionists? You could use that.
Paul in KY
@karen marie: Also they probably live in an 8000 sq foot house. You aren’t going to clean that monster by yourself.
Jimmiraybob
@RevRick: What was Anne Hutchinson’s offense?
Paul in KY
@opiejeanne: You should have messed with them just a bit. Made it seem like you were now infected with ‘wokeitis’ and needed them to come so you could eat their tasty brains or something like that.
Barry
“but because they have “beliefs”, the media … treats them with kid gloves”
I disagree. Note how centrist/liberal Christian beliefs are not given that much respect or deference.