The 'Alt-Right' Has Created Alt-Christianity

[applegrove]

Brian D. McLaren at Time

http://time.com/4915161/charlottesville-alt-right-alt-christianity/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017082517pm&xid=newsletter-brief

"SNIP.............


Sadly, Piccolini’s analysis aligns with the Nazi historian Richard J. Evans’ description of young men in 1920s Germany, as Jim Friedrich noted this week:

In examining the rise of Nazism in the 1920s, [Evans] saw desperate and resentful young men being attracted to extremism and violence "irrespective of ideology." They weren’t looking for ideas, but meaning... a pick-me-up to restore a sense of personal significance. "Violence was like a drug for such men… Often, they had only the haziest notion of what they were fighting for." … Hostility to the enemy de jour — Communists, Jews, whomever — was the core of their commitment. As one young Stormtrooper later reflected on the bonding effect of collective violence, it was all "too wonderful and perhaps too hard to write about."

White nationalist and "alt-right" leader Richard Spencer seems to understand this desire for meaning, personal significance and “bonding effect” described by both Evans and Piccolini. Famous for his Nazi salute and exclamation of "Hail Trump!" after Trump's election, Spencer has gushed about the torch-lit march in Charlottesville in religious terms: "I love the torches. It's spectacular; it's theatrical and mystical and magical and religious, even."

In a December 2016 conversation, journalist Graeme Wood, a former high school classmate of Spencer's, was surprised when Spencer started talking to him about religion, not defending Christianity but “he longed for something as robust and binding as Christianity had once been in the West, before churches surrendered their power to folk-singing liberals and televangelists.”

Piccolini, Evans and Spencer himself are telling us something we need to understand: White nationalism isn’t simply an extremist political ideology. It is an alt-religious movement that provides its adherents with its own twisted version of what all religions supply to adherents: identity, a personal sense of who I am; community, a social sense of where I belong; and purpose, a spiritual sense of why my life matters. If faith communities don’t provide these healthy, life-giving human needs, then death-dealing alt-religions will fill the gap.

.............SNIP"

[delisen]

1. Great Analysis.

[applegrove]

2. Yes. It rings true.

[Trust Buster]

3. Kind of reminds me of ISIS.

[stopbush]

4. Let's face it, regular old moderate Christianity is no bargain either.

When you elevate myth, fantasy and make believe to Biblical proportions (pun intended), it's not much of a leap to start believing in other false narratives, and to reject reality based facts as being fake news.

[TheBlackAdder]

5. This is partially fueled by the Biblical Inerrancy cult movement of the 1980s.

.


Before the 80s, people who thought of the Bible being without error were seen as pariahs.

Then, there was a big push, around the same time as the "Moral Majority" came to be, and churches slowly adopted this thought. Christians who believed in Verbal Dictation or Verbal Plenary Inspiration argued that, since the Bible was inspired by God, it must be perfect. Evangelical minister, Harold Lindsell, wrote a book and later headed the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. An astonishing 335 Evangelical leaders signed onto the “The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy."

Soon, the educated ministers were forced out of churches. Religious universities, began to purge any doctors who refused to sign onto inerrancy, since the Bible contains hundreds of erroneous and conflicting passages. Compound this with the modernist view that anyone can be a minister, without official training or education, as long as one was divinely inspired or felt so.

This led to a complete dumbing down of religion within Christianity, as the majority of church organizations and movements have now subscribed to this Biblical Inerrancy movement.


The problem with this belief, is that people must make up stories and excuses to resolve these Biblical errors.

Now, after 35 years, a generation and a half, most people are used to explaining away things to meet their needs. The educated are no longer acting as the firewalls of insanity, and lunatic fringes are now the keymasters to most churches.

.

[rurallib]

6. Between this post and the OP I think I just learned more about christianity in the US

than I did in my previous 67 years.
Thank you very much.

Amazing how a person can be living while this is going on and never hear a thing about it.

[guillaumeb]

7. But if this "alt-right" includes people such as Richard Spencer:

Spencer wasn’t exactly defending Christianity; he said that he, like Hitchens, was an atheist. But he longed for something as robust and binding as Christianity had once been in the West, before churches surrendered their power to folk-singing liberals and televangelists.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/his-kampf/524505/