https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sessions-and-sanders-radically-depart-from-the-christian-religion/2018/06/15/5216ac9a-70d2-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.f4ea0bc7e4b6
Elizabeth Bruenig writes:
The greater the truth, the worse the lie; the corruption of the best is the worst of all. People mislead one another all the time about temporary and venial things, which constitutes its own category of error, but rarely — even in the moral wasteland of American politics — do they get around to prevaricating about the eternal and cosmic. Lying about the capital-t, transcendent Truth is a category of error all on its own, whether you spend most of your time fooling others or just yourself.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders perhaps indulged in a bit of both Thursday, when asked about the moral reasoning behind separating migrant parents from their children at the U.S. border.
Sessions argued that, as criminals, immigrants have put themselves beyond the protection of God’s care. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” Sessions explained by way of scriptural warrant. He added that “orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves . . . [and protect] the weak and lawful.” Sanders later offered an artful gloss in defense of Sessions: “It is very biblical to enforce the law,” she said.
Here, whether deliberately or unknowingly, Sessions and Sanders radically depart from the Christian religion, inventing a faith that makes order itself the highest good and authorizes secular governments to achieve it. In Christianity as billions of faithful have known it, order and lawful procedures are not “good in themselves” and it is not “very biblical” to “enforce the law” whatever it might be. Rather, there is a natural order inscribed into nature. Human governance can comport with it or contradict it, meaning Christians are sometimes morally obligated to follow civil laws and are sometimes morally obligated not to.
Conservatives seize on this approach when it suits them; this is why they’re so keen on carving out legal protections for matters of religious conscience. Because religious obligations precede and generate civic ones, laws must accommodate religious practice, not the other way around.
As Sessions himself observed quoting James Madison in a lengthy October 2017 memorandum on federal protections concerning religious liberty, “the duty owed to one’s Creator is ‘precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.’” Sessions can either believe that or believe what he and Sanders said Thursday, but he can’t believe both. To put a finer point on it: God’s law can’t only precede — and top — civil law when a pharmacist would prefer not to sell the Plan B contraceptive, but not when it would appear a ruler is duty-bound to show compassion to strangers.
But there are worse things than confusion, or even than hypocrisy. One of them is self-deception. When Sessions invoked Romans 13 — a verse infamous for earlier bad-faith invocations to justify slavery — he shifted the subject of the question from himself and his own department to those under his control. He was summoned to defend his choices, his judgment, his own moral reasoning — but instead offered a condemnation of the decisions and morality of migrants. He wanted to talk about what, in his view, the Bible demands of the ruled. But he omitted the more important question: What does it demand of rulers?
Any number of scriptural passages aavailable here, though less useful for Sessions’s purposes. From Deuteronomy 10 : “For the Lord your God . . . loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Or from Jeremiah 7: “If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place . . . then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever.” Dealing compassionately with strangers seems to be a minimal requirement for just leadership in the model set forth by God, a theme that carries into the New Testament, where Christ’s followers are taught to view themselves as wanderers on earth, and to treat others with appropriate empathetic mercy.
But some Christians aren’t strangers in the world at all. Some are very much at home here, or believe that they are, and that there is no tension between the desire of God and the desire of man. People can believe any number of things, especially given the right incentives.
If you had all the power in the world, maybe you would also hear a serpent dipping its smooth body down from some shadowy bough to say: God wants you to do whatever you like with your power, and whatever you do with it is good.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-the-way-of-the-cult/2018/06/15/9a9c9346-70ad-11e8-afd5-778aca903bbe_story.html?utm_term=.f4671688dec7
Dana writes:
“It’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it?” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) mused this week about his Republican Party under President Trump.
As if to prove Corker’s point, the Trump administration the very next day claimed that it had the divine right to rip children from their parents’ arms at the border.
Officials justified the unique form of barbarism — taking infants from parents and warehousing children in tent cities and an abandoned Walmart — by saying they are doing God’s will.
“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday. “I am not going to apologize for carrying out our laws.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked about Sessions’s remarks, said: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.”
This isn’t religion. It’s perversion. It is not the creed of a democratic government or political party but of an authoritarian cult.
The attorney general’s tortured reading of Romans is exactly the strained interpretation that others have used before to justify slavery, segregation, apartheid and Nazism. The same interpretation could be used to justify Joseph Stalin, or Kim Jong Un.
Romans 13 does indeed say to “submit to the authorities,” because they “are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” But this is in the context of what comes before it(“share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality”) and after (“owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law”) – and, indeed, admonitions to care for the poor and the oppressed that come from Isaiah, Leviticus, Matthew and many more.
Evangelical leaders who looked the other way when Stormy Daniels and the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced this time have denounced Trump’s recent “zero-tolerance” policy that, as the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention and others wrote to Trump this month, has the “effect of removing even small children from their parents.”
“God has established the family as the fundamental building block of society,” they wrote. The leaders urged Trump to end zero tolerance and use “discretion” as previous administrations did.
But a cult, by definition, is not about mainstream theology. I looked up characteristics of cults in the sociological literature to see how Trump’s stacks up.
□ “Presents a distinct alternative to dominant patterns within the society in fundamental areas of religious life.” Grab ’em by the p—y!
□ “Possessing strong authoritarian and charismatic leadership.” I alone can fix it!
□ “Oriented toward ‘inducing powerful subjective experiences.’ ” Alternative facts. Fake news!
□ “Requiring a high degree of conformity.” See: Flake, Jeff and Sanford, Mark.
□ A tendency “to see itself as legitimated by a long tradition of wisdom or practice.” It is very biblical to enforce the law.
Check, check, check, check and check.
And members of the Cult of Trump, formerly known as the GOP, follow him over the cliff and onto the spaceship. They swallowed their heretofore pro-life, pro-family and pro-faith views to embrace Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries (“Such blatant religious discrimination is repugnant,” said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops) and applaud him tossing paper towels at Puerto Ricans as they died by the thousands because they didn’t get adequate hurricane relief.
They’ve joined his efforts to shred food, income and health programs that help the least among us while giving tax cuts to the wealthiest. They’ve accepted his abandonment of human rights abroad. They’ve joined his attempt to end family-based immigration and to threaten deportation of “dreamers,” immigrants brought here as children.
It appeared, briefly, that things might be different this time. House Republicans drafted legislation allowing children to be detained with their parents. But Trump on Friday signaled that he would veto the bill, and, as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said this week, the “last thing I want to do is bring a bill out of here that I know the president won’t support.”
This is the way of the cult.
Will the vivid cruelty of taking babies from parents, coupled with the obscene use of Scripture to justify it, finally lead some Trump supporters to abandon the compound? God knows.
But the rest of us don’t need to drink the Kool-Aid. Give to groups such as the Florence Project, which provides legal aid and social services to immigrant families in Arizona, and Catholic Charities USA, which provides crucial help to immigrant families in the Rio Grande Valley.
You don’t have to be a theologian to see the difference between people who do God’s work on earth and those who pervert God’s word to justify inhumanity.
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Yup! Time for all good people to come to the aid of those who are truly doing “God’s work on earth” by bringing serial child abuser, scofflaw, and false Christian Jeff Sessions to justice! Save the children! Stop Jeff Sessions! Force America to own up to and reject his toxic rhetoric and bigoted actions. His lies and outrageous abuses of his authority are truly “over the top.” The lasting damage he is doing to children will still be with our next generations long after Sessions, Trump, and Miller have gone to their final judgment. Harm to the most vulnerable among us is harm to all. And, harm to our children and God’s children is the worst harm of all!
Join the New Due Process Army! Just say no to Jeff Sessions!
PWS
06-17-18
