As far back as 2015, I joined others in predicting we would face a dystopian future with the GOP. That our predictions were accurate, especially as we realized that the parallels to 1930 Germany were the clear and present danger hulking over our nation, the long-term strategy of the right-wing was still below the radar. It wasn’t until 2017, when award-winning Duke University historian Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America” revealed the depth of the march toward fascism. And, wile MacLean showed is the origins of this danger to our country, other books followed that documented the rest of the story.
But, since I’ve’ written far and wide about these works and the exposé, it’s unnecessary to do so here. Rather, what I want to do is preserve a sermon from St. Andres’s Episcopal Church in Amarillo, Texas. Mother Miriam Scott, one of the priests at St. Andrews, grew up in Germany and was well-versed in her country’s history and the acts of the Third Reich. That endowed her sermon with gravitas. Her warnings and conclusions about weaponizing Christianity and Jesus Christ himself, was (and is) a condemnation of the fundamentalist Christian evangelicals embrace of fascism. And, of their corrupted leaders leading their flocks into the hands of those who wish to hurt them. Indeed, Mother Scott labeled, rightly so, weaponizing Jesus was blasphemy.
I have listened to this sermon several times and each time I understand more. I have posted it to Facebook, but that may be too transient. I post it here for more permanence, I hope. Please take the time to listen again and again. It’s important.
