Heathens & Heretics
Since we seem determined to have a civil war, let's examine this.
I’ve been saying We’re Gonna Fight for a while now; we seem determined to revisit The Great Southern War of Capitulation. As the few remaining veterans of World War II near the century mark we seem to have forgotten those lessons as well, leading me to add We’re Gonna Fight:International Edition to the mix.
So much of the last quarter century has been eaten up by the Clash of Civilizations, which Islamophobes see as a second era of crusades. But here in the U.S. Christian Nationalists have been taken aback by the unrelenting punishment they’ve received at the ballot box since our corrupted Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.
May of 2024 is the first time I’ve seen the Washington Post covering the Catholic Integralism takeover of the Supreme Court and positioning it as a concern for protestants. Do you recall all the sniveling you’ve heard about Shariah? Better think that over, because we’re five months away from November’s Civil War Referendum and this Catholic Shariah business is ABSOLUTELY on the ballot.
There are some other things happening at the fringes that bear examination …
Attention Conservation Notice:
All three of the Abrahamic religions irritate me, which is why I both converted to Buddhism and started voting Democratic twenty years ago. If you’re not into religious minutia I’m sure you can find better ways to spend your time than wading through this.
Heathens:
There are a variety of Neopagan belief systems that have been on the rise in recent decades. I used the word heathens in the title for the sake of alliteration, but this isn’t an insult, it’s a word that some of the groups use to self-describe, and this goes beyond German Heathenry. The first to interest me was the “prison religion” of Asatru, which I encountered during a radio engineering job that took me inside Nebraska’s maximum security state prison just after the turn of the century.
This has been what I would call an oblique sort of thing, it came back up for me because I’ve been listening to Dr. Jackson Crawford’s excellent video series on Old Norse. Asatru is pagan reconstruction - we have limited information about the actual devotional practices at the time, so people are fabricating things based on a mix of the fragmentary record, Christian norms, and common sense.
There is certainly a white supremacist angle to things like this, as there is with Anglish, which seeks to remove “foreign” words from English. But I also suspect there are motivations similar to what led to my conversion to Buddhism - incarcerated Americans have been force fed “faith based initiatives”, and Asatru is tailor made to send coercive evangelicals packing.
There’s a similar thing happening for Hispanics - the folk saint Santa Muerte. I’ve never watched Breaking Bad, what got me interested was Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. When I asked an associate from Mexico about this I got a little history and they confirmed that devotion to the folk saint Santa Muerte is a ‘gangster religion”.
Both of these belief systems are … there aren’t any billionaire adherents. Now envision what might happen between those two belief systems if there were a dramatic anti-immigrant effort in this country.
Heretics:
The most prevalent heresy in the Americas today is the Prosperity Gospel. Christians make supplications to god, the PG heretics believe they can MAKE god give them presents by praying. This is plausible during times of economic growth, but as our income inequality grows, there are … dangerous trends.
If praying leads to bling, why do some people have nothing? The homeless have always been the “other”, but now there is a broad effort to make being unable to afford housing a crime. This was instantly recognizable to me as the Prosperity Gospel heretics on the move.
There’s a seemingly related movement in Central and South America, but I think it’s less toxic. Where once there was only obedience and poverty being OK for Catholics, this southern wave seems to be about making it acceptable to do well economically.
The Catholic Integralists are tightly bound to Opus Dei, which can be most kindly described as controversial. Words like “cultish” and “clearly heretical” are also applied. My family arrived here 272 years ago from the Holy Roman Empire as refugees from Catholic persecution. I have most recently mentioned my precedent setting 1st Amendment case in Texas in Probable Pissposting. James “Pissboy” McGibney smears me using nealrauhauser[.]com, which he obtained from the original registrant, Jack Yoest. You should take a look at his wife, Charmaine Yoest.
Wildcard:
The thing that’s brewing that nobody seems to have a great handle on is Qanon. If you think they just went away, you’d better have a look at Reddit’s Qanon Casualties. This 276,000+ member Subreddit has daily stories of people “going NC” - short for “no contact” with family and friends who’ve been taken in by the Qanon cult.
But don’t listen to me on this, check what government agencies, top NGOs, and mainstream news have to say about it.
The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making? - Combating Terrorism Center at West Point (7/2020)
Examining Extremism:Qanon - Center for Strategic and International Studies (6/2021)
Qanon Crime Map - UMD’s START (2016-2021)
QAnon: The Calm Before the Storm - National Library of Medicine (3/2022)
Understanding Conspiracist Radicalisation: QAnon’s Mobilisation to Violence - International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (6/2023)
Fears of political violence are growing as the 2024 campaign heats up and conspiracy theories evolve - Associated Press (11/2023)
Apparently we can’t decide if it’s QAnon or Qanon, but if you want to go deeper there are a range of papers comparing this home grown conspiracy cult to ISIS. The belief that their opponents are torturing children in order to produce “adrenochrome” is de facto permission for them to do violence. This mirrors aspects of broadcast radio in Rwanda just before their genocide.
Conclusion:
Five months from now we’ll have November’s Civil War Referendum.
There appear to be two possible outcomes. One in which Joe Biden wins in an undeniable fashion, as far as rational people go, and a third of the country starts acting on the belief there has been another stolen election. The other is some weird flow of events where Trump appears to win by a landslide, after which two thirds of the country will see the Catholic Integralist regime as illegitimate.
Neither our first civil war, nor our recent counter-insurgency experience can advise us as to what this inevitable illegitimacy means. The best resource I’ve encountered thus far is David H. Ucko’s The Insurgent’s Dilemma. The prescriptions are … political, strategic in nature, it’s the other end of the playing field from the usual stuff covered here … but by knowing the history of various episodes in Afghanistan, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Ireland, Sri Lanka …
I don’t think we’re headed for a full on dissolution, we already decided that’s not allowed the first time around. I do think whomever feels aggrieved by the results will be forming para-states in opposition to the winner. We may end up with a united House, Senate, and Oval Office, but it will be in stark opposition to our corrupted judiciary. Given how feckless and foolish we’ve become, I find it hard to imagine the needed housecleaning. People are too easily distracted, blaming politicians for market forces that are beyond anyone’s control.
Each day I pray that I will be proven wrong to be so concerned … but I will not breathe a sigh of relief until late January of 2025.