Texas' Transformation Into a Christian Theocracy
By Carol Morgan
t used to be funny.
Rick Perry’s religious tent revival confession that he’s a “misunderstood prophet”, Tom Delay’s legal troubles as his “time in the wilderness”, and Raphael Cruz’ pronouncement that his son, Ted, was anointed by God to be President; all of it was chuckle-fodder for bloggers and late night comedians.
It’s no longer funny.
Consider Texas’ political events in the last ten years, and it’s easy to see that the GOP’s vision for the future of Texas is that of a Christian theocracy. It’s a frightening possibility.
Theocracy conjures up images of religious leaders who control everything and use their power arbitrarily to persecute others who don’t share their views.
When you examine past and present theocrats like Oliver Cromwell, Bloody Mary’s reign of terror, the Taliban or perhaps, even ISIL, the results are not pretty.
The U.S. Constitution says that there shall be no religious test for the office of President, but don’t tell that to the congregation at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano; a megachurch that recently held tryouts for those seeking the lead in their conservative absurdist drama.
That political gathering should feel unsettling to all Texans. It was deliberately provocative, dangerously blurring the line between the affairs of state and the church’s tax exempt status as a house of worship. It was same uncomfortable baiting as when a Lubbock Baptist church held a Republican meeting in its sanctuary on the day that SCOTUS upheld gay marriage.
You owe it to yourself to watch the mini-documentary, God and Governing, a production by the Texas Tribune and PBS. It’s enlightening (and a bit shocking) to see our Texas legislators and how stubbornly entrenched they are within the uncomfortable quagmire of religion versus law. It makes one question our lawmakers’ abilities to make evidence-based decisions about Texans’ welfare when they are restricted by a concept that has no legal basis in government.
After your viewing, please follow up by reading Texas Representative Donna Howard’s editorial on how religion combined with lawmaking creates a special club which excludes the over 10 million Texans (40 percent) who do not ascribe to a traditional religion.
I have no doubt that a tiny number of Christian politicians in Texas are sincere, but many of them are not. They use the word “God” as the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to obtain the trust of the gullible and naïve who buy into their unashamed ploys; mistakenly viewing Caesar and God as the same entity.
I couldn’t care less if law enforcement places “In God We Trust” decals on their vehicles, but it does bother me when our Governor chimes in with his congratulations and refers to it as “a patriotic display”.
How is a reference to religion “a patriotic display”? Patriotism and religiosity are two different matters, but our extreme religious leaders in Texas are beginning to regard them as one in the same.
This slow slide to Christian theocracy is a political strategy to use God as a weapon to divide and exclude Texans. As an interfaith believer, this offends me. One’s religion should be a private relationship between you and whatever god you worship, not be a badge of honor that screams of pride, self-righteousness, and superiority.
The recent alliance on Monday, between Dan Patrick and Ted Cruz, is a harbinger of things to come in Texas. Both men are Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists who believe they are compelled by God to govern over non-Christians. It is their explicit belief that they should control and dominate, not only the government, but family, religion, education, media, entertainment, and business.
It’s a mirror image of Sharia Law with a different label; the flip side of a coin minted as religious extremism.
Dan Patrick has already stated his prioritized initiatives for the future. Religious liberty and religious school vouchers (he calls it “school choice”) are at the top of his list.
A little over a month ago, Pope Francis warned churches that they should start practicing religion or start paying taxes. That’s a strong statement, but perhaps it’s true. Many of the mega churches thrive on their man-made prosperity gospel, but if you examine their work, outside of their private services and private social gatherings, there is nothing Christ-like about the way they conduct themselves, nor in the way they conduct their businesses.
The offering of prayers has become as perfunctory as “Have a nice day”. You know they don’t really mean it. Other Christians see these hypocrisies, yet they remain silent because they don’t wish to be excommunicated from their special social club.
One of the purposes of a church is to evangelize, but I wonder...has a big beautiful building, a pricey private school or a basketball activities center ever brought a person to Christ? Not likely…
It appears these walled and gated communities with their private schools are designed to keep people out, rather than invite people in. Their congregations have taken “be ye separate” way too literally. They disdain fellowship with “those people”.
The extreme Christian right in our state government is an outgrowth of these wall and gated communities of believers. They seek dominion over all things—the safety of Texas’ workers, women’s reproductive health, who we can love, the God-given right to kill others on a college campus, who will eat, who will starve, who will be sick and who will be well, who will be educated and who will be ignorant.
One of the many reasons our ancestors came to this country was to enjoy religious freedom, but it seems that some 250 years or so later, we’ve recreated the environment our ancestors so desperately desired to escape.
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Carol Morgan is a career/college counselor, freelance writer, and former Democratic candidate for the Texas House. She is the award-winning author of two books: Of Tapestry, Time and Tears and Liberal in Lubbock. Email Carol at elizabethcmorgan@sbcglobal.net , follow her on Twitter and on Facebook or visit her writer’s blog at www.carolmorgan.org
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Cross-posted in the Texas Group.
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It's a toss-up what's worst, the Old Testament or the Quran.
The Quran probably manages a short lead because of the higher density of violent injunctions.
But Torah/Old Testament has the benefit of being the original call to hate.
So it's really a close race to the finish line of which wins the prize of being the worst text.
Take an analogy. In Old Russian and Old Polish sources there are words attested for the first time. They don't show up in other places for a century or more, sometimes far more. Sometimes never.
However, they are clearly not Russian. They are Germanic names or words, Latvian or Lithuanian words. The sources predate the first Baltic sources by centuries, and there are no Germanic written sources of similar age with these words or names attested. Then again, there aren't that many old sources, so the evidence is spotty at that age depth.
To confuse first attestation with "originating with" is a mix post-hoc reasoning ("First in Russian, must be Russian"
and argument from silence ("Not found elsewhere, therefore wasn't to be found elsewhere."
It's fairly common and absurdly easy, quick thinking in some contexts. It's best to say not "original" but "first attested," even if that often demolishes the reason for making the claim outside of scholarly settings.
I think that I'd actually argue there is evidence for earlier "calls to hate." The very existence of syncretism we see in the construction of the Babylonian, NW Semitic, Hittite, and Egyptian pantheons presupposes some sort of motive. If you're going to equate some deities, there's a reason for it. If they're equivalent in worth but different in some attributes and there's no pressure to conform to one or the other by the new rulers or new dominant class; if there's nothing to be gained by converting or assimilating; then you have to wonder why the equivalence was put forward and asserted. A possible answer is that there was some benefit--if my god is really the same as your god, it makes assimilation easier (from the new rulers' perspective, because there's no religious animosity from the new conquests) and you're subject to less persecution or discrimination (from the new subjects' perspective).
For all the blatant differences and thorough-going contradictions between Allah and God the Father and Yahweh, we hear the same equivalence asserted today, typically to either gain acquiescence from subject peoples or acceptance by the dominant culture or class (and sometimes to garner historical prestige and legacy). Except that this requires acceptance of the equivalence by both sides. It's how Xians managed to survive under Islam when they were relatively powerless, and how Muslims managed to survive under Xians in the same situation. It's also why Jews tended to be persecuted by both sects fairly mercilessly--by rejecting equivalence, even when powerless, the hatred and intolerance that the assertion of equivalence otherwise diminishes can't be avoided.
Yes, the Hebrew Bible myths probably borrowed from a diverse array of earlier myths.
But they did their inventing work over such a long period and with such dedication one has to grant them a claim to some originality.
The whole story of Moses is rich with a diversity of invention(s) which is creditable.
And I hear the Hebrew language used in the Bible is very good literature. That's a specific claim the Quran makes about itself (when one takes 23 years to write a book, there should be a least something to show for it)
So, altogether, yes, those religious texts are not totally orioginal, but do show some originality. Not that it helps much, but let's give credit where that very small credit to religious texts is due.
In the rest of the developed world (Europe, Japan, Taiwan), religion is on the way out.
Not only with atheism rising, but also with a decrease in the intensity of belief of believers.
Why militant religiosity manages to show so much pugnacity in the US is a mystery to me.
...that's a holdover from post WWII dislocations. White people fled the cities (the White Flight) to the suburbs, and the relative lack of community (old neighborhoods, friends, way of life gone) and car-centric environment resulted in feelings of emptiness and an identity crisis in a lot of those folks. Even generations later, people were still moving and also had a sense their grandparents had something they lost. Material consumption was 'nice' but the more people leaned on it, the more frustration and confusion it caused. The 60s counterculture sprang from the postwar discontent (though its ultimate rallying point was anti-war)... Not much later the evangelical revivalism gained steam as an answer from the Right.
A quest to restore identity and feelings of belonging became co-opted by all sorts of hucksters and scoundrels, unfortunately, who ultimately shifted the movement to restoring National identity and greatness. People who used to think Jimmy Carter was great (helped get him elected, in fact) now worship greed and fear.
Its also more complicated than that... The country was heading into a crime wave, which the Right blamed on liberalism (it now appears to spring from the neurological effects of lead and other pollution during 'peak industrialization'). At the time, liberals had no answers (therefore, "soft on crime" so the right filled the political void and pulled society into their Calvinist tough-on-crime mindset.
Its pretty understandable, in a way. Its just as tragic that the hippies devolved into a wave of touchy-feely corporate types who put a fresh, trustable face on big business.
You probably covered most bases.
