IF IT QUACKS LIKE A RELIGION IS IT STILL POLITICS?
Between politics and religions is a sinister borderland where misinformation thrives. Some of it is relatively harmless — here’s “Prophetess” Kat Kerr announcing, on her extremely shitty, hard-to-use website The Revelation Zone, that she has “assigned” 100 million angels to protect the Republican convention this year. She also announced in 2018 that “God is going to vote Republican” and the Democrats won 41 seats, the biggest mid-term shift in decades. So the RNC might want to retain regular security services.
Kat Kerr is a Florida grifter in the style of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker from the 70s/80s. The Bakkers, you may remember as highly successful televangelists, scammers, and apostles of bad makeup — until Jim went to jail. Nowadays there are darker and more damaging versions of this type infesting the Trump administration (looking at you, Dominionists and Opus Dei.) They have gained real power to push their agenda in terms of legislation, administrators, and judges.
Also flourishing in this toxic stew of religious fervor and neo-fascist ideology are those weird little cults that have been leaking out into our reality from the internet. Consider the Order of the Nine Angles, a devil-worshipping, neo-Nazi, white supremacist group founded in the UK in the seventies. They are the literal worst; their rituals and beliefs are the dregs:
The Mass of Heresy, contained within the ONA’s Black Book of Satan, is performed before an altar adorned with a swastika banner, a framed photograph of Hitler and a copy of Mein Kampf. With black candles and incense of Mars burning, the congregation, dressed in black robes, chant:
Nick Lowes. HOPE not hate, Feb 2019
> We believe Adolf Hitler was sent by our gods to guide us to greatness.
> We believe in the inequality of the races
> And in the right of the Aryans to live According to the laws of the folk.
It’s like Aleister Crowley and Ghislaine Maxwell had a baby and it grew up in a Hitler Jugend camp. Adherents are supposed to infiltrate the military, police, churches, and activist groups in order to undermine them from within. That’s what US Army private Ethan Melzer did; he tried to arrange an ambush of his own unit and will now be tried for terrorist conspiracy to murder.
Our old buddies from QAnon have also moved offline and into meat-world, fielding candidates in almost two dozen U.S. congressional races — six are already on the November ballot, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado (brought to our attention by alert reader Susan S.) At least the Anons OPPOSE the idea of murdering and raping children, unlike the Order of Nine Angles who are all for it. Remember PizzaGate, back in 2016?
Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two […] grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns [..] drove 360 miles to a well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria […] because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong.
The Atlantic, June 2020, “The Prophecies of Q: American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase” by Adrienne LaFrance
Welch wanted to rescue captive children, so you could say he meant well. He was also bone-ignorant about how reality actually works, and believed a lot of nonsense he read on the internet (who among us?, etc.)
This intersection between right-wing politics and sketchy cults is a constant in modern history. Raiders of the Lost Ark used the Nazi obsession with occult power as an entertaining plot device, but they weren’t wrong – Hitler and his followers were fueled by all kinds of quasi-mystical beliefs.
Eric Kurlander, professor of history at Stetson University, carefully tracks the fringe movements and lunatic beliefs that swept through Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, he documents the intense interest in parapsychology, New Age fantasies and so-called “border science.” Some Nazi leaders firmly believed that the Aryan race descended from the aliens who established Atlantis, that Satan was really a good guy and that werewolves actually protected clean-living Teutons against the ravages and sexual depredations of Slavic vampires.
Washington Post August 2, 2017, Michael Dirda
The parallels between Trump’s MAGA Republicans and other authoritarian regimes are pretty obvious. Now, as then, you will find actual followers of Jesus/Islam/Judaism/Hinduism, etc. studying sacred texts, giving alms to the poor (universally prescribed), or wandering the desert in mystical ecstasy (always popular.) Or maybe just attending services and taking tea and biscuits in the rectory afterwards (substitute the beverage/snack appropriate to your religion.) These are harmless and even productive activities. But there’s always some particular wing of organized religion that just can’t resist the siren song of authoritarianism:
German Christians (German: Deutsche Christen) was a pressure group and a movement within the German Evangelical Church that existed between 1932 and 1945, aligned towards the antisemitic, racist and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles.[1] Their advocacy of these principles led to a schism…
Wikipedia
But America and the Western democracies should in no way feel singled out for this affliction! All nations are plagued by seriously misguided religious/political movements, ranging from random weirdos to lethal terrorists and criminals. Remember the Tokyo subway sarin-gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo in 1995? Pretty grim. The Soviets banned religion for decades, yet the Russians are now plagued with cults because banning religion is like banning music – it’s an attempt to suppress a basic human impulse and it doesn’t work. From Lenin to Yeltsin, the Russian Orthodox Church stayed on the down-low but stayed alive, and now they have to deal with this guy:
Covid-denying priest Father Sergei Romanov seizes Russian monastery: An ultraconservative Russian priest who denies coronavirus exists has taken over a women’s monastery by force. Father Sergei Romanov entered the Sredneuralsk convent outside the city of Yekaterinburg on Tuesday [….] The controversial cleric was barred from preaching in April and then stripped of the right to wear a cross in May after he encouraged the faithful to disobey public health orders.
BBC News, 18 June 2020
He’s an ex-cop, ex-convict, Rasputin-wannabe who worships the last Tsar and conducts dubious public exorcisms. But, as my tech support remarked, “Their lunatics at least LOOK at lot cooler than ours. He’s not just a pile of old, sunburned ham in a ball-cap and shades.” Which is funny ’cause it’s true.
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