Republicans mired in death cult

Some of the language in the article tends toward the inflammatory, but it's pretty accurate overall. I grew up in Evangelical Christian communities in the '70s and '80s, and was involved in them through most of the '90s, before I finally saw them for what they were (the old JREF forum was very helpful in that regard, although I'd already begun to discard the theology by that point). My parents were (and are) staunch Republicans as well, and I saw a lot of what is described in the article close up (although, again, I had started to discard GOP politics and was involved in libertarianism before it was taken over, first by Randroids then the alt.right, which itself is closely tied to the death cults).

Apocalypse Now: Why Republicans Are Destroying the World

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Most of the world was baffled by the Trump Administration’s decision to relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Sure, Republicans had been threatening to do this for two decades, but Trump was the first President sufficiently unconcerned to carry out this self-sabotage unilaterally, with nothing in return. It was a provocative statement, destroying the last remnants of US credibility in the Mideast peace process, signaling a new commitment to permanent enmity with the Islamic World. The US joined exactly zero other countries in making this puzzling move. What did the American people gain? Nothing, it was a pure loss for the US, and a dangerous escalation of tensions in the wider world. So why did Trump do it? Beyond that one decision, why is one of the most unapologetically racist leaders in our history, a man lauded by KKK leader David Duke for his anti-Semitism, such an enthusiastic supporter of Israel? Trump moved our embassy to Jerusalem to satisfy a crucial element of his base, and it isn’t Jewish voters. White evangelicals, the voting bloc consisting of roughly 20% of the national electorate and about 80% of the GOP’s remaining organizational leadership, cheered this step. They see how inflammatory and potentially disastrous this simple move could be, and that’s why they wanted it to happen. Over the past generation, white evangelicals have embraced what can only logically be described as an apocalyptic death cult. They are unconcerned about Mideast wars, climate change, poverty or of course, racism, because each new disaster brings us closer to their religious fantasies of The End. Our powerful religious nutjobs, who utterly control the Republican Party, yearn for the day when they can look down on you from a living heaven while you suffer a world of unrelenting horrors. White evangelicals, through the Republican Party, are voting to make the apocalypse now.

This is not hyperbole. I went to these churches, and this is exactly the sort of stuff that is being preached. And I'm not talking the little little backwoods hicktown one-room churches of the stereotype; these were the huge megachurches ranging from tens of thousands to millions of members who all collaborate and conspire together to spread this doctrine of hate and self-indulgence. Starting with the Assemblies of God, and graduating to the hardcore Evangelical televangelists like Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn, Casey Treat, Kenneth Copeland, and on and on. These were the founders of the church networks that my family and I belonged to, and the backbone of the Evangelical believer base that elected Trump and his cronies, that elected the undisguised racists in federal and state government, and tried to elect a dead pimp in Nevada and a child molester in Alabama.

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Ask an American evangelical today about Armageddon or the End of the World, and you’re likely to hear a story gleaned from popular literature that descends not from the early church or the Bible, but from the colorful imagination of a 19th century English cultist. After being seriously injured in a fall from horse in 1827, lapsed cleric John Nelson Darby began to write down the theology God had revealed to him. Most of his work was forgotten, and his teachings flopped entirely in Europe. However, one element of his cult mythology caught fire in the US, especially in the South. By crafting together bits and pieces of Biblical text like the disconnected words on refrigerator magnets, Darby invented a story of The End Times perfectly suited for the needs of slaveholder religion in the South. It was called Dispensationalism.

The theology of Dispensationalism is complicated, but can be effectively summed up as G-D making different rules for different times, and as we are now in the end times, believers are no longer bound by the rules of love and compassion as they once were, but by a more elitist, militaristic separatist theology. A theology that dovetails very nicely with existing racist and anti-Semitic worldviews.

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Belief in The Rapture encouraged an inversion of Christianity, in which all the powerful, difficult elements of traditional Christianity that encourage compassion, humility and positive engagement in the world are dismissed as irrelevant. The universe becomes a grand trash bag, to be used and discarded, with no hope of improvement. It produces a worldview in which goodness is defined-down to mere cult loyalty.

The author's explanation of the history of Dispensationalism is, while sensationalist in its wording, essentially correct, and very details. I highly recommend reading it.

The upshot of it all is that that religious worldview, starting in Nixon's time, rapidly came to define the politics of the Republican party.

Not going to quote from the rest of the article, since it's hard to do so in the sort of "sound bite" form that is so popular here and elsewhere. It gets very detailed in the progression from Dispensationalist theologians, to the believers in this theology taking over leadership of the GOP, and their efforts to implement this worldview world-wide.