They’re Baack

Ed. Note: Here's a bonus post focused on my little town in SoCal, and how the politics of division now emanate from a local church.

Now, from the same folks who brought you slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, poll taxes, the KKK, Jim Crow, and lynching, comes the current iteration of hate in the guise of religion. They call themselves Christians, but these folks are more interested in power than piety; they are long on demagoguery and short on Christian charity.

In the book, “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote: “When fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-fascism.” He nailed that.  And he wasn’t alone.

“As We Go Marching” is a 1944 treatise by John Marshall Flynn. He wrote: “But when fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement…practicing disloyalty…It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders…will know…how to attract to their banners leaders, who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be Fuhrers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certainly deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there.” Change some titles and, voila, it’s contemporary and scary.

There are a lot of pols and pundits out there—and good for President Biden for calling them out—claiming that it’s the left that’s fascist, not people on the far-right. You know, the ones that have supported the Big Lie, fought against the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th, have rigged congressional districts to make sure only their candidates prevail, have suppressed voting rights, and have placed election deniers in charge of elections.

Biden sounded the alarm, but the bully pulpit isn’t what it once was. The fragmentation of media has left us without a mass consciousness or an agreed upon set of facts. Used to be, when the president spoke, we all heard it. Not anymore.

The melding of religion and politics is as old as the country itself. No matter what right-wing churches say about our Founders, they didn’t seek to build a Christian nation, and specifically warned against government supporting any given religion. They were deists, but took pains in our founding documents to separate church and state, explicitly warning against a cozy relationship between religion and government.

In SoCal, the Awaken Church of La Mesa is controversial at best. From hosting nationally known right-wing nationalist speakers, to election denying, to calling its enemies demons, it sounds more like a political organization than a house of worship. It has an affiliate, dubbed the RMNNT, that appears to be a bit paramilitary, calling themselves “Warriors of Liberty” and boasting about rising up in arms as their religious duty. They even have a video of a heavily armed, menacing couple traipsing through hill and dale to drive the point home.

This brings me to Coronado’s mayor, Richard Bailey. The RMNNT has been advertising the mayor as a special guest at Awaken Church, teaching its members how to run for school boards. That’s another priority of Christian Nationalism, to first disrupt school board meetings with angry people shouting about issues that are cultural hot-buttons. Next comes running for school board. As we have seen elsewhere in the nation over the past year, when they are successful it often leads to school superintendents being fired, teachers being accused of a host of absurd things like “grooming,” books being banned, and a sanitized teaching of history. It’s a bit like Americanized sharia law.

Coronado Eagle publisher, Dean Eckenroth, recently wrote a superb editorial about removing partisan politics from our community. Partisanship was never an issue here, and our town was much better off as a result. It’s puzzling, and alarming, that our charming and likable small town mayor became associated with such activities. I cannot see how they serve our public schools, or our community.

The remarkable Phillip Roth novel, “The Plot Against America” imagines a USA where Charles Lindbergh prevails over Franklin Roosevelt, and after remaining “neutral” in WWII, allowing the Nazis to win, begins remaking our country in the image of Germany and the Third Reich. It was not a safe place to be Jewish, Black, gay, or disabled.

Incrementalism is the saboteur’s friend. In fiction or reality, the point that the average citizen recognizes that their democracy is suddenly an autocracy comes too late in the game to change the outcome. Look no further than Poland or Hungary to see the effect of denuding democracy one rule at a time. Watch for court stacking, election engineering, gerrymandering, and the politicization of the Civil Service, and note that one at a time, they’re not alarming, but cumulatively, they signal the death of democracy.

©2022 Jon Sinton