Recently, a friend since high school, an individual, a self-identified, as of late, Christian-nationalist, curtailed — in the stark, cold manner that I have witnessed true believer Christians are prone — our friendship due to a recent article of mine in which I called out the fascistic elements of Christian-nationalism and genocide-apologist aspects of Christian Zionism. In his shunning of me, he made clear, at least in my mind, he was a (willing) victim of the affliction of the collective soul that scholars of the phenomenon term: Authoritarian Personality Type.
Authoritarian Personality Theory, developed by Theodor Adorno and Frankfurt School colleagues as well as other thinkers, such as Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt, posit that afflicted individuals are, by compulsion, drawn to “strong” (weak at heart and sick of soul) authority, crave rigid social structures and conventionalism resultant in intolerance towards non-conformity. Over a period of time, repressed aggression curdles into xenophobic angst that will become displaced as hostility towards outsider groups.
To wit, my “saved”, devotee to the Prince Of Peace friend attempted to shame me, the offspring of a Holocaust survivor, for expressing fear regarding the dismal and deranged phenomenon of the rise of authoritarianism in the US and the Zionist ethnostate’s perpetration of genocide in Gaza.
(Don’t you just feel the love of Christ when Trump and Pete Hegseth are dropping bombs on fishermen off the shores of Venezuela?)
Sorry, if you are reading this piece, old friend, but defenders of Zionist and ICE thugacracies have careened into the realm of Third Reich adjacency. The shame is on the deluded/and or dissembling tongues of the US version of Volksgemeinschaft as the authoritarian MAGA jackboot is being lowered on the necks of the powerless.
This individual, two years ago, in the days after the Gaza open air concentration camp uprising known as the October 7 attacks, offered to hide me and my family in his home, when, in reality, Jewish persons such as myself were in the sum total of nada danger from (phantom) anti-Semites who would be coming for Jews.
I suspect he was convinced that he was following the example of Nazi Germany’s Righteous Gentiles* — yet he has not issued a word of rebuke — nor offered the human beings who, as these words are being composed, health and safety are being threatened by ICE thuggery — moral support nor sanctuary.
(*A “Righteous Gentile” is a non-Jew who risked their life to save Jews, a term most famously used today to honor rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. The title is also based on a traditional Jewish concept of non-Jews who follow the Seven Laws of Noah.)
Upon ceasing communication with me, he evinced a heartbreaking, soul-defying coldness regarding his demand that I cease calling out, in my articles, the proponents and enablers of US style authoritarianism or our friendship would be dispatched to the archives.
How did I miss the coldness concealed in his character — of how he came to choose dead-as-dust dogma and fascist demagogic lies over friendship?
Where does this type of Christianity — without any discernible measure of Christ — come from?
In addressing the question, a digression:
My maternal grandparents, due to their home and property being stolen by the Nazis, received (modest) payments of restitution from post-war German governments. Also, top Nazi officials were jailed and tried as war criminals.
Justice will not prevail until the people of Gaza receive restitution (as opposed to more ethnic cleansing) and officials of the Zionist thugacracy are delivered to the dockets of war crimes tribunals. I know, it’s not going to happen. But will happen: Israel will continue its unabated crimes against humanity.
What will come to pass, as the trend continues, because Israel is not going to be subject to sanctions nor suffer lasting consequences for the nation’s crimes against humanity — and, in certain deranged, yet powerful, circles — be heralded as heroic for their perpetration of genocide?
The US, as is the case with the Zionist state, was founded in ethnic cleansing and through it settler-colonialist expansion westward committed genocide. In Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan when US imperial troops left their fortified compound areas, the soldiers averred, they were entering “Indian country.”
Telling, huh? The US is responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings during its war of aggression in Indochina… but did not suffer from consequences, insofar as making restitution, for its hideous actions. Since 1990 alone, the US has killed four million people of the Islamic faith.
In short, the US is a death cult disguised as a nation.
Now, armed governmental forces patrol the streets of the US and practice, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, extraordinary rendition upon those who are deemed as alien-others.
Mass shooting sprees have been normalized. The right-wing gasbag grifter Charlie Kirk, at the moment he was felled by a gunman’s bullet, was waxing demagogic about “gun rights.” Moreover, he had posited that firearm related deaths were an excusable price to be paid to protect the Second Amendment. The damn fool justified his own murder.
Nations, as noted above, that do not suffer consequences for their blood-drench crimes against humanity devolve into death cults.
Appropriating the rightwing extremist, Christian-nationalist’s Kirk’s death, as an emblem, they conjure, from their rancid, collective souls, their own demise.
Withal, the fate of the US and all in its path, if my Christian-nationalist friend and his life-detesting, Jesus-sans-the-Jesus part, death cult continue to control the mechanisms of state.
What will restore my friend to sanity and bring remedy to the harm his belief system is inflicting upon the world? It is contained in the very pages of scripture of the book to which he claims absolute felicity but his and his true believers work bear soul-defying, mind-poisoning, heart-killing fruits.
Great sorrow awaits you religious scholars and Pharisees—frauds and imposters! You are nothing more than tombs painted over with white paint—tombs that look shining and beautiful on the outside but filled with rotting corpses on the inside. Outwardly you masquerade as righteous people, but inside your hearts you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. — Matthew 23:27-28
What could restore to sanity the troubled, noxious minds of authoritarianism-ruled, Christian-nationalists shunners of the Christ-image?
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and will give you a heart of flesh. —Ezekiel 36:26
Yes, my old friend, as you wander the authoritarian desert of the heart — there is water in the rock — but, first and foremost, I suggest you redeem the stony heart inherent to the authoritarian mindset:
The post The Rise Christian Nationalism and the Ending of a Friendship first appeared on Dissident Voice.He brought streams out of a rocky crag and made water flow down like rivers. — Psalm 78:16
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.