Biden's Base

This bit is about the Biden college debt forgiveness program,though it takes its time wandering over there:

She's got an impressionistic understanding of something sort of real, but the thing it overwhelmingly runs on is pretending that nonwhite Democrats don't exist or aren't really part of the polity.

— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky) August 29, 2022

That is, to the extent Democrats seem richer to Catherine Rampell, it's because she can't remember there are any Black ones. Although she's also completely wrong either way, as Bouie points out.

It's the same pattern you see in the commonplace picture of American Christians as consisting of a deeply rightwing majority dominating a rump of liberals in what used to be called the mainline churches. It's based on ignoring the existence of a large Black church overwhelmingly committed to the social gospel; when you count those, most Christians are actually on the left. This is still truer since 2020, when the number of (conservative) white evangelicals dipped, at 14%, below the number of (liberal) white mainliners, at 16%. Add to the latter the 7% of the population who are (liberal) Black Protestants, and divide the total 22% Catholics (white, Hispanic, and other "of color") between the two (more Catholics identify as Democrats than Republicans but it's not a huge number), and you get a total of something over 34% of Americans on the relative Christian left compared to something under 25% on the Christian right—far more, with the Christians "of color" making the main difference.  

You read it here first.

Via PRRI Research.

With Democrats and Republicans, I'm not going to try to do the real numbers, but the argument would go like this: 

Notes on Christianism

Still from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il Vangelo di Matteo (1964), via a blog called "El Primo de Marty Feldman".

So Cardinal Cordileone ("Lion's Heart") has excommunicated Speaker Pelosi, at least when she's in San Francisco—I don't suppose he can stop priests elsewhere from ministering to her—over her support for laws permitting abortion in a society that is 78% non-Catholic. 

Excommunication seems pretty crazy to me all the way around. It's not like shunning, where the criminal is sent into complete social exile. Excommunicated Catholics remain legally part of the community, they're even expected to attend Mass like everybody else, but they're barred from the sacraments, remaining in their seats while the congregation goes up to receive communion. It occurs to me that that is exactly the opposite of what happens in the Gospel narrative, as Matthew tells it: during the Passover seder service on the evening before his death, Jesus literally hears Judas's confession (though Judas doesn't realize he's confessing)

For the Record: Whatever it is, Marquito is against it

Byzantine mosaic, 12th or 13th century, in the cathedral of Monreale; the two wayfarers Lot invites into his house in Sodom turn out to be angels, and warn him to get out of town. Photo by Ghigo Roli.

This wonderful move by the Biden administration  to compensate some of the horrors wreaked by the Trumpies deserves more attention than it's getting—

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday that the Biden administration is in talks to offer separated migrant parents and children around $450,000 per person. That would mean that if a parent and a child were separated at the border, together they would be eligible for a combined payment of $900,000.

—and Republicans want to provide it, in the worst way:

For the Record: Christianity and Stuff

Residents of Tecun Uman, Guatemala, and migrants from Central America cross the Suchiate River June 10, 2019, to enter Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico. (Photo/Jose Cabezas, Reuters). As long as Father Martin exists, you'll never get me to say Christianity is evil, though I do understand the temptation.

Anyway this person informing me that ex-governor Huckabee seemed not to be a good Christian didn't realize that she was going to trigger me:

The "old testament" or Tanakh as some of us call it is the basis for a deeply compassionate religion known as Judaism. Huckabee knows nothing of it.

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 1, 2019

I guess you know fuck all about Judaism too. Go away before I report you.

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 1, 2019

After that, it occurred to me that it might not be obvious to her why anybody might have a negative reaction to being told their Holy Book is evil (and she's probably somebody who thinks of herself as being "of the left"), and I started trying to explain, in an absolutely not hostile or oversensitive way:

Pompeo

Esther and Asahuerus at her banquet, with Haman lowering at the side, just realizing he's doomed, by Rembrandt, 1660, via Wikipedia.

Speaking of conservative Christians who recognize Trump for what he is but think that's what God wants him for, see Susan Glasser's terrific New Yorker profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:


March 2016:

On March 5th, Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, arrived in Wichita for the caucus. Rubio left his closing argument to Pompeo, who told the crowd at the Century II arena, “I’m going to speak to you from the heart about what I believe is the best path forward for America.” An Army veteran who finished first in his class at West Point, Pompeo cited Trump’s boast that if he ordered a soldier to commit a war crime the soldier would “go do it.” As the audience booed, Pompeo warned that Trump—like Barack Obama—would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.”

August 2019:

An Irony of Unimaginable Proportions

Reprinted (with minor edits) from Christmas 2012

On the conservative Liberty Counsel radio show Faith and Freedom, hosts Mat Staver and Matt Barber discuss the fact that an elementary school in Jackson County, Fla., removed a nativity scene while allowing Santa Clause and Frosty the Snowman to remain. “What an irony at this time of year, where Jesus gets put in the closet, and in California, where we’re litigating out there, where they’re wanting to make homosexuality the preferred method or topic of counseling discussions, but anything contrary to that would be banned,” said Staver.

“This is just an irony of unimaginable proportions,” he went on. “When we say there’s a war on Christmas and somebody says ‘oh,’ mockingly, ‘oh there’s no war on Christmas,’ this is a war on Christmas. This is discrimination, it is viewpoint-based discrimination.” Then Barber argued that as “people who are engaged in all form of aberrant sexual behavior” come out of the closet, “Christians are being forced into the closet, and here literally the baby Jesus is forced and crammed into the closet."

(Via Raw Story)

Houses of Parliament, London, February 2009. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe.

If homosexuality is the method of the counseling discussion then it's not the topic, and if it's the topic then it's not the method, because anything contrary to that is banned, but you don't have to have counseling discussions at all, honestly, and most of us don't. At worst you can just have counseling. Let the record show that.

As to whether it's a war or not, that's a matter of perspective, isn't it? But to my way of thinking, there's something awfully violent about the concept of a war and it doesn't represent the way I feel, which doesn't even have anything directly to do with Christians and Christmasites; it's more about our own traditions and families, and preserving them the way they've always been.

For the Record: The Derp Penalty

Everybody else was out saying you wouldn't even have Christianity without capital punishment, and I appreciate that, but doesn't that imply that it's already served its purpose? If Christians don't need to avoid pork or shellfish or sex with women during their periods because their Redeemer has redeemed them from all that, why would they have to put up with executions, of all things? Ilya Repin, Golgotha, 1869, via Varvara. 

Disappointed that young Monsignor Ross Douthat hasn't come out formally to protest against Pope Francis's announcement that the death penalty is "inadmissible", though he has produced a pretty subtle Twitter thread where he wonders if the Pope has gone even further with this than he did when he suggested it might be OK to let divorced people take Communion sometimes, and how dangerous could that be for the future survival of the Holy Mother Church, though he's pretty sure the death penalty issue is less serious than the divorce one—

But the bottom line is that this is another example of how Pope Francis has consistently exposed the tensions in the post-Vatican II conservative position, and pushed the JPII synthesis into intellectual crisis.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 2, 2018

—it's one of his technical pieces, written to assure 12 or 13 of his readers that he's really as intellectual as he looks, and he's pretty careful not to have any feelings about it other than your "concerned kitten is concerned" frowny face, and not adjure to anything controversial like having his own beliefs about right and wrong.

Yule be sorry

Photo by jag9889 at Flickr.

For my whole life, Macy's Herald Square, the World's Largest Store, recycled an increasingly dingy-looking window display every Christmas consecrated to the store's own peak presence in popular culture, the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street, starring Natalie Wood as the little girl raised not to believe in fairy tales and Edmund Gwenn as Mr. Kris Kringle, the man who believes he is Santa Claus and who ends up not only convincing the little girl that he exists but in bringing about a Christmas truce between the warring titans of capitalism, Macy's and Gimbel's.

But a couple of years ago they finally abandoned it in favor of something new, referring to the story of Virginia O'Hanlon, the eight-year-old who asked the New York Sun, in 1897, to confirm for her the same saint's existence, to which the editor Francis Pharcellus Church notoriously replied, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus," in language attempting to double-speak the audience between parents who'd see the line as a metaphor and children who wouldn't:

For the Record: American Idolator

Image by Thor.

I made a contribution to the #IfTrumpWereSanta hashtag:

#IfTrumpWereSanta

Dear Santa,

You're incredibly smart and capable, and vigorous for your age. You've accomplished more than any other Saint. You've really made Christmas great again. It's such an honor just to be writing you a letter. Please bring me a million dollars.

— Xmastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 23, 2017

I want to pitch a new reality show, American Idolator, where the contestants all have to live for some months in a bubble under a crazed and capricious authority figure whose rages and terrors must be placated at all costs, and they all bad-mouth each other in anonymous interviews (on-camera silhouettes with disguised voices); each week somebody is voted out of the bubble as the subject of the most damaging leak. The hook for an episode is some incident where the Leader makes himself look like an idiot and all the contestants work to devise ways of helping him feel good about himself (like the early episode where he insists, against easily available evidence, that his poorly attended inaugural festivity is the largest inaugural festivity in history), etc. The last segment in each episode is a "cabinet meeting" in which the contestants go round the table vying for attention through extravagant flattery of the Leader, after which the Leader says "I'm not happy with" the preselected victim and they must pack up and go home. When they're down to the last two, the winner gets a Golden Calf or a big stone Ten Commandments or something.

Make Ireland Great Again—Bring Back the Druids

St. Patrick (in halo) reclines on a hillock, while the beasts of the vision he is having frolic underneath. Wauchier de Denain, Lives of the Saints, Paris, 2nd quarter of the 13th century; British Library, Royal MS 20 D. vi, f. 213, via University of Notre Dame.

.@realDonaldTrump Happy St. Phatrick's Day to you too! (It's Pádraig, not Phadraig)

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) March 17, 2017

Let them eat bacon

Terrorists don't expect the Spanish Inquisition. Via Food is Love.

Via John Amato at C&L:

Jeb Bush on Tuesday dug in further on his position that the United States should prioritize bringing in Christians from among the refugees of the Syrian civil war — and he insisted that people can even prove that they’re Christians.

“Well you’re a Christian,” Bush started off saying to reporters. “You can prove you’re a Christian. It’s—”

“How?” a reporter asked.

Bush gave a shrug: “I think you can prove it — if you can’t prove it then, you know, you err on the side of caution.”

I know how you do it. Make them eat pork! Technique developed in Spain 500 years ago for outing secret Muslims, and Jews of course, always works.

The Spanish Inquisition — officially known as the Holy Inquisition Against Depraved Heresy — was established in 1481 in the city of Castile and subsequently spread throughout the Christian territories. The Inquisition was directed against conversos, former Jews, who were accused of religious heresy and political subversion through secret Jewish practice. To establish such practice, the Inquisition trials (under the direction of Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, who, perhaps not surprisingly, was also of converso origin) took testimony about the accused’s alleged Jewish activities — many of them, as it happens, culinary in nature. (Forward)

Some people might think adopting the methods of the Spanish Inquisition sounds a little un-American, but I'd just call it conservative. That's what "err on the side of caution" means, right? If you're a little bit suspicious, better to let them die, bcause why should we bear any of the risk? Tough times call for tough measures.

The only way to stop a bad guy with a religion

Al Jolson and May McAvoy in Alan Crosland's and Gordon Hollingshead's The Jazz Singer (1927),. Image via Alchetron.

1. Theodemography

So the good news is, according to David Brooks, "Finding Peace Within the Holy Texts", that secularization is over, and a process of desecularization is under way, because this always happens. In part, it's just simple arithmetic, because the unsecular have more babies.

Research by the German theodemographer Michael Blume shows that every nonreligious population in human history, going back to ancient India and Greece, has fallen into decline, while the world population on the whole continues to expand, indicating that the Old Order Amish and the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe are swiftly taking over the planet, which will not surprise you if you've ever been in the Williamsburg Greenmarket, or maybe it will (I go to Manhattan greenmarkets myself, actually, where you sometimes see a lot of Amish pretzel salespersons, which is what made me think of it, so I don't really know, but the online pictures suggest that there's nobody there from either group.)

The sociobiological theory behind this, by the way, apparently taken up from the thinking of the economist Friedrich von Hayek, is possibly not known to David Brooks, and it's that religiosity is an adaptive evolutionary trait; females of the species tend to gravitate toward males who go to church, or whatever, as a sign that they are more likely to be solid family guys who will take an affectionate interest in their offspring's survival, thus boosting the replication chances of their girls' genes as well as their own. Thus when Faust is seducing Gretchen she asks him "Sag, wie hast du's mit der Religion?" (Tell me, how do you feel about religion?), showing what kind of mate she's particularly seeking (pay no attention to the facts that Faust evades the question and she sleeps with him anyway, and that she ends up going mad and drowning her baby and thus fails entirely to transmit his and her genes to the next generation).

Annals of derp: Canon balls

Giovanni Venanzi of Pesaro, 1688: King Solomon being led into idolatry by his wives. Via Wikipedia.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, demonstrates once again that he's just not that good at theology and canon law, in his allegations of a "conspiracy" on the part of old Francesco to "rewrite" Catholic doctrine with regard to the policy of allowing divorced-and-remarried Catholics to take communion:

Francis’s purpose is simple: He favors the proposal, put forward by the church’s liberal cardinals, that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion without having their first marriage declared null.

...if his purpose is clear, his path is decidedly murky. Procedurally, the pope’s powers are near-absolute: If Francis decided tomorrow to endorse communion for the remarried, there is no Catholic Supreme Court that could strike his ruling down.

I'll cherish that old rugged Ross, rugged Ross...

Crusaders meeting Muslims, Jerusalem 1099. I believe an Arab artist, but I can't identify.

According to Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, the history of the Crusades, to which President Obama adverted in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, is "incredibly complicated".

Obama said,

Cheap shots: Endorsing evolution

H/t BooMan:

Carnival Cruise Lines endorses evolution. See what happens when you get rid of Kathie Lee Gifford? #SuperBowl
— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) February 2, 2015

Enchanted by the concept of "endorsing evolution". Could the swag they give you include a pair of gills? I would so be down for that. I wouldn't even ask for cash:

North Carolina Terrorists Win

The strange, evil foreign muezzin sending waves of sharia out across defenseless Durham. No wait, it's only a Duke student, Ibrahim Saber, rehearsing the three-minutes-a-week performance inviting his friends to perform their religious obligations, which is now not going to take place because some heavily armed Christians seem to object. Photo via WRAL radio.

That is, the plan for the Muslim Students Association at Duke University to use the chapel bell tower as a minaret to broadcast one Friday call to prayer each week—prayers have been held in the chapel basement for years, and nobody's complained about that—has been scrapped.

Not apparently because of the efforts of Reverend Franklin Graham and his brothers in bigotry to get university donors to make financial threats to the university:

Christmas Exceptionalism

Away from a manger. Nicolas Poussin, La Nourriture de Jupiter (1636-37). Wikimedia Commons.

"Biblical theologian" Scott Hahn, author of Joy to the World: How Christ's Coming Changed Everything (and Still Does) (2014), doing a book tour interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO in that curious style of hers, where she always seems to be working backwards, taking a prepared text and interpolating questions into it:

LOPEZ: Why is it important to notice that Jesus “doesn’t behave like a conventional hero”?

Those wacky Christianists

Welcoming the forthcoming Aaron McGruder comedy series Black Jesus on Adult Swim:

Focal Point host Bryan Fischer put out an “action alert” on his show yesterday because Black Jesus will depict Christ “in the hood,” where he will be “handing out booze to people on the street, homeless people, it looks like to me.” He went on to note that he believes the show “plays to the worst stereotypes of the black community,” and expressed surprise that “black leaders in the NAACP” weren’t already “outraged” by it. (Raw Story)

In the hood.

Christmas Eve Sermon

Exotic pie. Ad art by Psyho Studio, Ukraine, via CK's Weblog.

The Christianists are saying that Piers Morgan was "smacked down" on the sodomy subject by Dr. Michael Brown, the former "LSD-using Jewish rock drummer" whose mission nowadays is to "proclaim salvation to the Jewish people". Actually, as you'd expect, the argument is quite familiar and easily dismissed (though only if you've either [a] memorized the Bible or [b] have easy and quick access to Dr. Google, as Morgan presumably didn't during the interview). But it also has a really funny twist that I'm sure I've never noticed before.

When Morgan asked Brown to cite just one instance of Jesus condemning homosexuality, he probably thought that he had already won the debate. But alas, he was hoisted on his own petard.

Brown cited not one, but three instances of Jesus condemning homosexuality.

When you say "Happy holidays" are you aborting Christ? Asking for a friend.

Drawings by Josh Lange, Credo Magazine.

 Update: Welcome BooManiacs! Nice to see youse.

Adams to Jefferson, 28 June 1813:

It is very true that the denunciations of the priesthood are fulminated against every advocate for a complete freedom of religion. Comminations, I believe, would be plenteously pronounced by even the most liberal of them, against atheism, deism,—against every man who disbelieved or doubted the resurrection of Jesus, or the miracles of the New Testament. Priestley himself would denounce the man who should deny the Apocalypse, or the prophecies of Daniel. Priestley and Lindsey have both denounced as idolaters and blasphemers all the Trinitarians and even the Arians. Poor weak man! when will thy perfection arrive?

Ex-governor Palin, as cited in Jezebel, on the War on Christmas:

“If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we will not follow our constitution, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our constitution is based on, so those revisionists, those in the lamestream media, especially, who would want to ignore what our founders actually thought, felt and wrote about in our charters of liberty – well, that’s why I call them the lamestream media,” Palin said....