The Weaponization of Christmas and What Trump's White Christian Supporters Want: Selections from Recent Commentary

PRRI, " 'Merry Christmas' vs. 'Happy Holidays' "

A pre-Christmas smorgasbord of items I've read in the past few days, in which you may be interested:

Where Do Christians Go From Here? When "Pro-Life" Christianity Deals Death, Time to Turn Our Backs on the "Pro-Life" Game

4 in 5 white evangelicals, 3 in 5 white Catholics and Mormons — "pro-life" voters — brought us the Trump nightmare.

I will not forget.

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) December 15, 2016

"Now is the time to talk about what we are actually talking about," declares Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a powerful, hard-hitting post-election essay rich in moral insight that refuses to entertain the palavering, both-sides-have-a-point games of the American chattering classes — when those morally evasive games have brought us Donald Trump. They have been, in fact, signposts and paving stones for the path that has led the nation to Trump, though getting the nation's intellectual arbiters in its media,  its churches, and its academies to admit the large role they have played in paving and signposting the road to Trump is a meaningless and futile enterprise: moral awareness is simply not what the chattering classes do, even as they engage in moral rule-making and ethical pontificating.

Bilgrimage Is Wildly Popular in Russia — So My Stats Counter Tells Me

So fascinating, the number of Russian computers trained on this one tiny blog in the U.S. week by week — and the numbers, which have been very large for some time now, have only picked up after the Trump election. Next to its American audience, its Russian (and Ukrainian) audience is its largest "readership" — with some of the hits to Bilgrimage from those parts of the world coming from Russian sex sites to which . . . someone . . . for some reason . . . has chosen to link the blog.

When Toxic Religion and Toxic Politics Meet to Create a Death Cult of Historic Proportions: Where Do Christians Go From Here?

Any political movement that is

anti-women
anti-poor
anti-Muslim
anti-LGBTQ
anti-immigrant
anti-refugee

is anti-human and anti-Christ.

— Nathan Hamm (@NathanHamm) December 12, 2016

Here are some things I've read in the past week or so that I'd like to share. I will use them as the basis for a subsequent posting asking where we go from here — "we," as in any of us interested in the question of what Christian churches or religion in general can contribute to the American public square, now that white American churches and their leaders have placed the country in extreme moral crisis and have displayed the complete vacuity of their "Christian" message through their support of Donald Trump.

Had One of My Church Dreams Last Night: An Advent Meditation

Had one of my church dreams last night. Church dreams are, for me, often painful ones involving tears (the impossibly distant altar I can see from high in the eyrie at the back of the church to which I've been consigned, but which I cannot reach at communion time). Or, they are the opposite, ecstatic ones involving singing and a gladdened heart.

#NotNormal: Choosing Normalcy As the Not-Normal Prevails

This is what the end of democracy looks like pic.twitter.com/MmnUHE56AE

— CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) December 1, 2016

In what is becoming an increasingly dark moment of global history, due to the determination of economic elites to pick one last time over the carcass of a defunct late-capitalist economic system built on the exploitation of the many to put more wealth into the pockets of the already grossly rich, what do we who believe (whether in any formal religious sense or not — this matters not a whit) in the possibility of a more humane world do? Those rapacious economic elites are crashing democratic systems of government everywhere in the world. They're doing so deliberately, since their rapacious picking over the carcass of late-capitalism — which is to say, over the carcasses of all of us — depends on their having total control of the mechanisms of national and international government, so that there will be no checks and balances on their rapacity and cruelty.

What's Church for Again? A Tale of Two Churches

What's church for? I've been asking this question repeatedly on this blog during the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election. What's church for when its members — the people who brand themselves with the name of Jesus Christ — are the source of some of the most egregious slights to the humanity of people on the margins of society to be witnessed in the world today?