I'm Starting to Hate Sundays
First, congratulations to the Detriot Lions and Matt Stafford for winning the Super Bowl…oh…wait!
It’s not David French’s fault per se, but I’m starting to hate Sundays. David writes something at The Dispatch. It infuriates friends of mine. My phone buzzes the entire day with people sending me links demanding to know what I think. It is more a Sunday routine of late than church. We’ve been going to Sunday School and avoiding church the last couple of months as omicron swept through. I’m ready to go back. But it just means when I get out of church at noon my phone will be having seizures from all the messages flooding in if David has been near a keyboard.
By the way, I love David. We don’t necessarily agree on stuff and the man has atrocious taste in movies, but I know David personally. I enjoy his company. I can disagree with David and he with me and we can still enjoy each other’s company as long as he shuts up about his terrible movie opinions. David’s movie opinions are worse than his sports opinions. But the man has a heart for the Lord and he is my friend. I’m getting used to having friends across the political and theological spectrum who other friends of mine don’t like. I don’t really care, though there are days it wears me out.
I do want to note that I disagree with David’s tweet below.
As I’ve documented, I am really alarmed with the growing desperation on the left. I actually think much of the political radicalism David is writing about will fade, in large part because it is premised on one man.
On the left, the New York Times, New Yorker, Oxford Review of Books, and more are all favorably profiling an environmentalist who wants progressives to start building pipe bombs and blowing up pipelines because they have to save the planet. They more and more literally believe we are at a climate tipping point.
Greta Thunberg is encouraging people to shut down cities. She believes humanity’s days are numbered if the West does not give up its existence. She has followers who believe it and congresscritters who believe it. In Europe last week, people superglued themselves to major highways to shut down traffic in a climate protest. Out in the western United States, people have sabotaged rail lines carrying oil.
Concurrently, progressives view the GOP as a threat to democracy. They believe Trump is an authoritarian. They more and more internalize that if Republicans win in 2022, the democracy is over unless they fight. The left has a multi-decade history of violence in this country going back to before the sixties. The left has tried to blow up the Capitol. The left has tried to assassinate leaders. The left has tried to blow up the State Department. The left has killed policemen. They have a documented history. The charismatics do not. The Pentecostals do not.
Read past David’s tweet that incited everyone and actually read what he writes in full and you’ll note something you should be alarmed at.
It is, for historic reasons, common for black churches in America to let Democrat politicians in to rally the crowd. But a growing number of charismatic churches are bringing in not Republican politicians, but QAnon conspiracists and tying that conspiracy to pastoral prophecies that cannot really be disproven.
We should all, on the right, be concerned with that trend because it starts building walls between parts of the center-right coalition that become impenetrable. In Georgia, a small group of election conspiracy theorists are committed to tearing up the GOP and handing Georgia to Stacey Abrams because they believe Governor Brian Kemp didn’t do enough to stop a stolen election. Kemp, for what it’s worth, is constitutionally prohibited in Georgia from playing any role in the election. But they are so committed to the conspiracy, they’d literally prefer sitting home and handing it to Stacey Abrams than have Kemp win again.
This sort of stuff not only fosters radicalism, but creates divides that are not bridgeable and, at a time the GOP is set to sweep back into power, provides a sense of grievance Democrats can capitalize on to convince these people to stay home. It was, after all, Democrats in Georgia who put up billboards all over that state in the 2021 Senate runoffs that said, essentially, “They’re going to steal it again. Don’t bother voting.” The message worked.
I don’t think the phenomenon is as significant as David writes. I think his tweet actually turned off a lot of people from considering a point they’d otherwise probably agree with — the one I made above. I also think, unintentionally, David’s tweet provides further fuel to the left’s ongoing shift to violent radicalism. After all, they want to counter the right.
Please, though, don’t get so hung up on the tweet that you miss a growing number of churches are inviting QAnon and election conspiracists into pulpits to lie to congregations and that could really hurt the GOP in November and the nation too. And it could lead to the violence David is concerned about.
Please also understand, I think we really need to pay a lot of attention to what is happening on the left. A group on the right has tied some radical conspiracies to one man. The left, along with a helping hand from the mainstream media, is seeding a violent turn against elections over both climate hysteria and fearmongering about the GOP. I think that ends far worse than the Charismatics having Mike Flynn on stage.
Also, for you Christians, David is one of you even if you disagree. So maybe disagree without the invective. “But what about David? Didn’t you hear what he said about us?” Yes, I did. Did you not hear Colossians 3:13?
That’s all I’ve got to say about that.
I understand the point, but is it really just churches that invite QAnon? Do we not have pastors of mega churches that became political commentators on Fox News for the duration of the previous presidential term? Did we not have people in high positions in churches, such as Southern Baptist churches, that were run out of the denomination because they refused to bend the knee and do what Mr. Erickson says, of connecting one man to prophecy and equate him to salvation? Have those events disappeared? Yes, as Mr. Erickson points out, it is associated with one man, but the man is still alive, he is still preaching as he is the savior who was faulted by faithless people. Will that go away soon? Or will it radicalize more and more people at the pews? I do not have the answer, but the thesis seems to have proven itself.
"I actually think much of the political radicalism David is writing about will fade, in large part because it is premised on one man." Erick, my friend, I'm sorry, but you are wrong. It's the so-called "progressive" Left that has radicalized not only politics, but every major institution in the United States. The Trump phenomenon is simply a response to that. People are sick and tired of IT and aren't going to take IT anymore - insert your IT laundry list here. Trump was simply the person that the backlash coalesced around. If another more capable standard bearer of the movement comes along, for instance, Governor Ron DeSantis, then so be it. I don't care if it's Trump, DeSantis or someone else with the intestinal fortitude to take on the radical Left. However, milquetoast types like Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and those that David French and his ilk might support need not apply.