Category Archives: Sedition Watch

Is 45 Making Jesus Great Again?

For a long time I’ve felt that much of the deepest internal struggles in American culture have religious roots.
Sure, there’s also politics, class, race, gender and empire involved as well. But take off your Bubble-colored glasses and look closer, and religion pops up in most of these contexts too.
Further, one passage, Romans 13:1-7, has long been close to the center of these conflicts. It equates worldly rulers, and their use of “the sword”, with God’s divine order. and has long been used to support whichever ruler a preacher most favors.
Blogger Doug Muder, who on most Mondays puts out “The Weekly Sift,” reviewing the past week, has an excellent brief summary of the current version of this larger struggle, summed up in the question: “Is Trumpism Becoming a New Religion?”
In technical terms, my initial answer to Muder’s query has to be “No.” That’s because whatever it is, this new cult is definitely not “new.”
But on Muder’s main point, if there’s a religious character to what we face, and a struggle between gods, or at least idols, my answer is not just “Yes,” but “Hell, yes.”

The Independent Report on the Charlottesville Riots

From the report: “In contrast to the July 8 event, the City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety on August 12. The City was unable to protect the right of free expression and facilitate the permit holder’s offensive speech. This represents a failure of one of government’s core functions—the protection of fundamental rights. Law enforcement also failed to maintain order and protect citizens from harm, injury, and death. Charlottesville preserved neither of those principles on August 12, which has led to deep distrust of government within this community.”

Richard Spencer, U. of Florida & Free Speech: All Winners. But It Was Ugly.

Of course, Spencer wanted a huge media circus, and he got one; but he didn’t draw a meaningful audience from his targeted institution. They handed out 800 tickets for the event, but only about 400 showed up, including numerous press.

He also, with difficulty, got to make his speech, in the face of nonstop jeers & boos, advocating that a “white nationalist ethnostate” be carved out of the U.S. by “peaceful ethnic cleansing” (whatever that would mean).

On the way out, he was crowing:

Orlando Sentinel: “As . . . the throng of protesters who disrupted the event headed for the exits. Spencer insisted they hadn’t defeated him.

“You think that you shut me down? Well you didn’t,” he said. “You actually failed at your own game … because the world is going to look at this event and the world is going to have a very different impression of the University of Florida because you acted this way.”

Outside there was a crowd of a couple thousand protesters: rowdy, often profane, but essentially nonviolent; two persons were “detained”; a few pro-Spencer fans were roughed up, but were then escorted away by police.

Of course, the protesters had lots of help in keeping their overall cool: 500 or so police, state troopers, many heavily armed, including SWAT team snipers perched on the roofs and balconies.

The Spirit of the Klan Haunts the 2016 Election

All these images, as should be evident, feature and celebrate the Ku Klux Klan, in its second mass incarnation, from the 1920s. Yes, including the anti-immigration wall.

In that decade, the Klan recruited several million members, and became politically powerful for some years in many states, and even took over the state government of Indiana, and ruled in many cities.

But our concern here is less the history of this mass upsurge (fascinating and horrifying as it is!) than some of the movement’s key themes, because they have much current echoes and resonance.

I researched these themes and the images last summer. And a key to their resilience came in an obscure editorial in one of the few Indiana newspapers to challenge the Klan. In 1923 when the order was riding high in the state, an unnamed, beleaguered editor in South Bend, called it out as “Klanism”:

“Klanism”; it’s a clumsy term, but then the Klan specialized in ungainly verbiage. And the editor was right: the Indiana Klan, followed by other Klan groups, collapsed from internal corruption and scandal by the late 1920s. Yet the attitudes evoked in these images and its standard rhetoric not only survived, they have even flourished in other guises.

After all, many Klan sympathizers were prevented from officially joining by work rules or other constraints. But this didn’t prevent them from sharing the Klan’s signature issues — or from sticking with them when the Klan itself receded.

At its height, the 1920s Klan attracted hundreds of thousands of “respectable” folks: professionals, successful business people, prominent matrons, church leaders. (In fact, its leaders made special efforts to recruit ministers and pastors, waiving fees and other requirements, and not shrinking from offering outright bribes.)

One such beneficiary was the famously pugilistic evangelist Billy Sunday (1862-1935), one of whose mottoes was “fighting the devil & sin.”

Billy Sunday, ready to rumble. One of his more memorable quotes was: “A sinner can always repent, but stupid is forever.” Amen.
Once in 1922, Sunday was about to launch into a sermon in Richmond, Indiana (home of Earlham, a Quaker college, and many Quaker Klan members) when, according to the Indianapolis Times, a dozen Klansmen came marching in, “clad in white robes and attended with much mystery.” They presented Sunday with a fifty dollar, um, contribution and a letter of endorsement. (Sunday did not fight them off.)

Dog Days True Quaker Stories: The Party That Went On Too Long

Much of my initial “information” about the Communist Party came from watching a TV show, “I Led Three Lives,” after we got a TV in mid-1952. The show started the next year and ran for more than a hundred episodes. It was inspired by the true-life career of Herbert Philbrick of Boston.

For years, Philbrick was a seemingly ordinary white collar office worker. But he was also a secret member of the Communist Party, spying and planning to overthrow the American government — and even more secretly, a double agent helping the FBI foil the Communist schemes. In 1952, he published a best-selling book about all this; and Hollywood jumped on the story line.

(In an episode I sadly missed, one such –fictional– plot was about how the party was going to turn vacuum cleaners into handheld missile launchers. Sound, um, far-fetched? But J. Edgar Hoover approved that episode, as he did all of them, so it must have been thrilling.)

Now I know much better how, in the late 1940s and into the 1960s, “the Communists” were a very big deal for Americans. Hiss’s two trials marked a major turning point in U.S. public opinion, toward a hard anti-communism, of the sort I grew up absorbing like milk on cornflakes.