We Have Been Duped.

It didn’t happen all at once.

We have been duped. A better way for me to express it is to say we are just now realizing that we were being duped over a very long period of time. “We” is everyone other than MAGAts and additional Russian assets if there are any.

I am more than keenly aware that most people who think independently and fairly don’t even want to hear these days about organized religion. I understand that better than most, but let me tell you why we cannot keep the role of religion out of our reasoning processes when we’re trying to understand the manner by which we were duped. In a nutshell, the reason is because organized religion has been a primary tool by which this great delusion has occurred.

We would not have a Trump in the White House now if not for the fact that back when the fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist Convention were successfully dismantling that once tolerable denomination—and I say tolerable because no religious hierarchy ever has been or ever will be free of dark corners, though some good can get accomplished despite that— they kept their focus on a greater prize. The greater prize was the complete takeover of our federal government.

The days of trying to stomach comments that perhaps are well-intentioned though monstrously uninformed about all of us serving the same God regardless of our religious identifications or all people wanting the same basic things need to be as dead immediately as morality in the Republican Party. I’m a monotheist. I believe there is one God and one God only, but I do not believe for a second that everyone who claims to have a conception of God much less a connection to God has in mind the actual God.

In the United States context where “bigger is better” has long been a standard—until a micro-penised president cheated his way into the White House—religious groups, who had frequently struggled to stay alive, adopted the same standard for themselves. When that happened, Christianity, for example, which is supposed to be based in service to all strugglers, kicked servanthood to the curb and decided religion’s deity henceforth would be Power at all costs. That was step one we could say. Step two came along when the principle of separation of synagogue/church/mosque and state was rejected. None of this happened in a loud and boisterous way. These things happened very gradually, systematically. Most people hardly noticed.

Here’s another thing about the way organized religion is regarded by many people in the United States and probably in most of the first world. Spin doctors of the church worked days, nights, and weekends having religious groups participate in creating and sustaining the illusion that people of faith are kind and good and sweet and passive and stupid. Not many people want to be unkind or disrespectful to someone who seems to them to meet these criteria. That was part of the fatal flaw—approving the content of a message based on the emotional dynamics of how the message is presented.

I’m a retired professor of preaching to seminarians and public speaking to undergraduates. Plenty of public speakers, including professionals, have believed that with the right emotional flavor—even with a bullshit message—they can persuade audiences to believe certain things and act in certain ways. Depending on personalities, for some speakers that has meant they are going to come across so so sweet. For other speakers, the approach has been to sound aggressive from the pulpit or the lectern; be loud and demanding. Smart people like those of you reading this know that both of those approaches work. The merit of a message should reside exclusively in the message itself.

Then, staying with the religious dimension of the duping about which I write, we run into the complication of being given false information by those people we love and trust and respect and lean on. MAGAts breed MAGAts.

In the last congregation I served as a pastor, some of my congregants put together a booklet of several of my sermons that evidently were believed by many involved to be worth remembering. The question came up, what would the title be? My older son is a wordsmith, and I asked him if he could think of a good title for this project. He thought about it for a few days and came back with the title that those interested in publishing the booklet liked: Lies My Sunday School Teacher Told Me.

As the booklet made its rounds in the community, with friends and family members, I started getting slammed—not because my liberal views were unacceptable, but because some who’d seen a copy of the booklet were afraid I was diminishing well-intentioned and good-hearted Sunday School teachers. That was not my intention at all, nor the intention of my son and the little group of people who were distributing the booklet. Not many Sunday School teachers outside the world of MAGAts would intentionally lie to the children they teach at church. But many of those Sunday School teachers passed along lies and other untruths because someone whom they trusted told them what teachers were saying was truth.

The fundamentalists who ended up splitting the Southern Baptist Convention wide open, leading to its eventual decline, counted on the gullibility of people who wanted to take at face value what anyone told told them if she or he was on the list of people to trust because of role and relationship. What I’m describing here more than any other single factor allowed evil to enter through the back door until there was enough momentum for evil to feel empowered to walk right through the front door.

Exactly the same thing is happening today with the increased power of misinformation by the MAGAt instigators and enablers, shamelessly attempting whenever possible to couch their words and deeds in religiosity. It’s still working and more effectively than even the evil shot-callers anticipated. It’s one thing to be duped into believing wrong information and being left with a faulty understanding of what is true. It’s entirely something else to be duped into believing what causes us to act in a way that hurts ourselves as well as others.

Part of reclaiming all that has already been lost to the extent that is even possible is calling a lie a lie and refusing to listen to those we already know are liars. That means, for starters, not listening to anything Trump or any member of his family or any appointee of his has to say because every one of them is a perverse soulless self-serving liar. I don’t care how religious they pretend to be, how sweet, how aggressive. I don’t care how much MAGAt religious groups come to their aid.

It is an act of integrity and self-preservation and self-care to absent ourselves from liars and the information they want to dispense. Anyone who believes that she or he still owes a liar a listening year is an idiot and a danger to the recovery of democracy.

A disturbing informational tidbit—eerie and haunting. The late Judge Paul Pressler was a key figure in the takedown of the Southern Baptist Convention by which I mean the empowerment of fundamentalists-only within that denomination. A protégé of his is the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.

More later.

AI generated image of Pressler