republican party

The history of Christianity is one of argument over the meaning of Jesus, the role of sin in life, and humanity’s relationship to God. Or at least, that’s what Christianity is supposed to be about. Instead, the world has witnessed a protracted conflict over scripture, its authorship and verity, and how we’re supposed to understand critical aspects of the book Christianity calls the Holy Bible.

To understand these questions more clearly, consider that when Jesus arrived on the scene two thousand years ago, he followed in the wake of a man called John the Baptist, of whom there was a supposed prophecy. Isaiah 40:3: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: ” Prepare the way of the LORD; Make straight in the desert. A highway for our God.” John’s role was clear: cut through the religious legalism of the day and place the focus on repentance of sin. He challenged the rules and rituals of the temple authorities, and Jesus later dismissed them as meaningless to a relationship with God.

We all know what happened from there. The religious authorities took great offense at being questioned. They sent people out to quiz Jesus on the rules they made from scripture, and Jesus tossed revealing questions back at them. They could not answer him effectively because their hypocrisy in implementing those traditions was apparent: they loved the authority it conferred upon them. Jesus also found the use of the temple for commercial purposes offensive. He attacked those conventions by creating a whip out of cords and drove the vendors out of his “father’s house.”

None of this took place because the religious authorities were Jewish. Jesus was a Jew by birth and faith. But he despised what conservative religious authorities had done to turn Judaism into a religion of law rather than love of others. He used parables to instruct people on the ways of God that stood outside the Torah as examples of the right way to live. Most of these stories drew from daily life experiences, and many used organic symbolism: the mustard seed, the yeast in the dough, to draw connections between nature and spiritual truths. That’s a vital example of how we’re supposed to read the Bible. Yet centuries of adherence to biblical literalism and the legalism that emerges from it have buried Jesus’ wisdom and ways under layers of bad theology, defined as defending God when God does not need defending.

Rather than learn from the conflicted nature of the religious authorities in Jesus’ day, the religion known as Christianity repeated its mistakes many times in history. The Catholic Church used purgatory as a money-making scheme based on a Jewish reference to the purification of souls. One of their priests, Martin Luther, challenged this brand of legalism and sought to emphasize salvation through grace.

That led to the Reformation, a religious movement that produced Protestantism, a branch of Christianity that, to this day, many conservative Catholics consider illegitimate. But Protestants went on to invent their form of legalism, which goes by various names, including fundamentalism, biblical literalism, and today’s populist form called “apologetics.”

All of these constitute the most legalistic forms of Christianity. Many focus on “obeying the rules” and engaging in the confessional language of latter-day Christianity. These habits frequently dismiss Jesus’s core teachings in favor of adhering to a set statement of belief encompassed in creeds or, worse, through alliance with political aims of power and authority.

That brings us to the problems facing America today, where politically charged religious beliefs assemble a form of allegiance to God and Country. This approach is collectively known as Christian Nationalism, fueled by the brand of Christianity called Dominionism, a repeat of the same legalistic fascism that religious authorities engaged in two thousand years ago.

When you trace the behavior patterns to their religious sources, it’s easy to comprehend. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden sought to take Adam and Even under its authority and control by quoting God and pretending to defend God’s Word. “Did God say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” and then issues the legalistic half-truth that leads the couple into sin, “You will not surely die.”

See, the Serpent “was more clever than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.” It knew how to manipulate people to take them under its authority. It tempted them with promises of knowledge and authority, stating, “God knows that when you eat fruit from that tree, you will know things you have never known before.”

Where do we find that type of temptation repeated in scripture? Satan tempts Jesus in the Wilderness by inviting him to use power and create bread to assuage his hunger or to submit to Satan’s authority and earn all control over the world. See, the temptations of legalism have always been with us. It’s sad that Christianity so often succumbs to its own worst flaws and then tries to impose them on the world. That’s what we’re facing in the United States of America: a religious mindset that assumes it owns all authority but ignores the corruption at its core. That belief system is easily exploited by those who excel at manipulation and seek power for themselves, historically, theologically, and politically. Jesus didn’t like or abide by any of that.

I’m the author of the book Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs A Reality Check and How To Make It Happen. You’ll find solutions to the problems caused by legalistic Christianity, and ways to confront its many forms in social media, politics, and otherwise.

Sociopath: a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.

Perhaps you noticed the difference in tone between the Republican and Democratic debates? The Republican “debate” was all about name-calling, angry accusations and selfish calls for political support because the “other guys” both within their own party and political opponents outside the realm of Republicanism are doing it all wrong.

Basically what we saw was a line of sociopaths socializing over a menu of red political meat. And to no one’s real surprise, they were eating their own.

Contrasts

By contrast, the Democratic debate focused on issues of substance, and when issues like the Hillary Clinton emails came up, candidate Bernie Sanders steered the subject back to matters that mattered. “Enough about your damn emails,” he barked. “Let’s talk about real issues.”

See, there really is a moral equivalency that needs to be measured in the nature of how Republicans conduct themselves and the manner in which Democrats are trying to solve America’s problems. Notice the difference there? For a lineup of sociopaths, it’s literally impossible to think about the impact of what they’re saying about others. They don’t care. They’re antisocial to a major degree.

Crass and uncaring

Donald Trump is leading the polls on the Republican side. His misogyny is so bald-faced and crass. His entire campaign is about the fact that “he’ll do this” and “he’ll do that.” And it will be better. He’ll force people to the table to negotiate. And if they don’t like his deals, he’ll dump them and move on. He’s the king of anti-socialites, primped with a bad hair style and a bad brain beneath it. He’s a sociopath.

And yet he rallies the sociopaths who love his style. That’s because there’s a brand of socialism that emanates from sociopathy. That’s how organizations like the Klu Klux Klan were able to help impose Jim Crow laws that favored whites across the nation. All social advantage was conferred to white people through economic and political power. Blacks were denied jobs and even a seat at the counter or on the bus.

This is the most evil brand of socialism. Here’s how it is defined:

Socialism is a social and economic system characterised by social ownership and/or social control of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy, as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system.

Do you begin to see how it works? Sociopaths like Donald Trump and Marco Rubio (who acts like a serial murderer) and Chris Christie and so on…love to claim they favor capitalism as a socioeconomic system. But their brand of capitalism does not provide equal opportunity for all to participate in the system. By definition and design, the Republican Party has concocted through a combination of Good Old Boy political favors and outright bribery and control by industries such as oil, pharmaceuticals and even agriculture, turned America into a socialistic oligarchy.

Oligarchy: a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.

When you put the two words together, Socialism and Oligarchy, and study how our economy has been manipulated to push wealth to a small fraction of ownership, you begin to realize that the socialism proposed by candidates such as Bernie Sanders is really more like a market correction than it is an attempt to socialistically redistribute wealth from one segment of society to another.

We recently saw the result of a market correction as managed (and designed) by the greedy sociopaths currently running our economy. America’s wealth convulsed and contracted, and millions of people lost millions of dollars, jobs and wages became depressed as a result. Meanwhile the richest got richer. We were literally told that the tax dollars of everyday Americans would be necessarily used to bail out banks that were “too big to fail.”

Convenient untruths

Well, isn’t that convenient? Meanwhile millions of middle class and often middle-aged Americans were cast out of work, and companies refused to hire them if they were out of work more than six months. Then a cast of sociopathic Republican Senators and Congressman began to blame these Americans for collecting unemployment insurance. They refused to pass a bill that would allow people to keep collecting said insurance as they continued looking for work. They further accused people of not even trying to look for work.

I sat around the table at a business luncheon in 2009. Around me sat a group of local businessmen, all who blanched when the banking industry speaker admitted that companies like his would not soon loosen restrictions on loans for capital and payroll loans. You could feel the anger and frustration surge, for these were good conservative people who ran businesses that employed other people. They felt abandoned by the very system they supported. They were victims of the socialistic sociopathy of oligarchic capitalism. But one wonders if they recognized it, or would ever change their vote to people that actually cared whether their businesses survived.

It’s doubtful.

Hierarchies

The sociopaths at the upper levels of the economy have zero empathy for other people, you see. By definition they entirely lack “a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.” And when the economy tanked, many of them actually gave themselves performances. Big companies held parties using the federal dollars they received in bailouts. That is the most sociopathic thing one can conceive.

See, it has become a pattern in the America that the socialism of sociopathy works against the interests of everyday people trying to make a living, run businesses, raise a family and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And as if the economics of sociopathic socialism were not enough, the political Right also wants to rule the inside of a woman’s body, and prevents the Equal Rights Amendment from even being considered for passage.

Well, shoot

Meanwhile, the sociopathic socialists also constructed a gun culture in which the rights of everyday people who do not want to own or possess guns are being forced to consider their own safety just by attending school or going to a movie theater. The sociopathic socialists tell the world that guns make the nation a safer place to live despite the fact that 30,000 annually die from gun violence. Guns are the perfect expression of sociopathic socialism, because they now are legal for Concealed Carry in all 50 states, and lobbies are working to pass Open Carry laws so that people can walk around brandishing weapons in public.

Stop and think about that for a moment. We’re talking about a fully militarized society at that point. All people who do not carry weapons would be at a social disadvantage wherever they go.

Fighting back meekly

Small efforts to combat this brand of sociopathic socialism still exist. One can find No Guns signage on the doors of churches and businesses that do not want people carrying weapons. And yet, the sociopathic socialists warn that it is No Gun Zones that are the most dangerous places because it confers advantage to so-called criminals with guns.

How is this logic even tolerated? Well, the slogan for gun rights that trump all other rights is “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

And that, my friends, is the most sociopathic statement ever concocted. It actually invites people to kill. Look at those last three words. “People kill people.” That’s the slogan for sociopathy. And now it is socialized into our country’s lexicon.

Good gun owners

Granted, there are millions of gun owners that use and keep their weapons lawfully. But they are doing precious little to prevent the sociopathic strain of gun owners from ruining their rights as guaranteed by the Second Amendment. Instead these lawful gun owners either weakly or submissively go along, or else get on their Right To Bear Arms stump as if standing proudly above others on grounds of the Second Amendment and ignoring the part about a “well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security fo a free state…” was justification enough to ignore the fact that our police are being shot and killed and hundreds of thousands more people per year are harmed by gun violence.

Hate, fear and aggression

This is the socialism of sociopathy. It harnesses hatred, fear and aggression to confer political power on those whose worldview has no empathy, and whose greed blinds them to the mechanics of true democracy, which works to provide an equal and fair playing field for all citizens.

It’s no coincidence that political leaders like Paul Ryan cite the sociopathic writings of Ayn Rand as a model for his own behavior. Or that men like Newt Gingrich could deliver an ultimatum note to his wife in her sickbed from cancer, and take part in all sorts of other schemes while hypocritically castigating President Clinton for his affair. And that supposed Good Guy Dennis Hastert was paying hush money all these years to cover up his own transgressions while pretending to be a man of high honor.

All of them, sociopaths. These are not people of good character, and they have assembled a political party around principles that are exclusionary, manipulative of cultural norms and backed by a strangely sociopathic brand of Christian faith that is literally divorced from the teachings of Jesus Christ.

It all requires a considerable amount of cognitive dissonance to sustain. But the fundamental sociopathy behind a cultural force that works against social welfare by blaming the victims of its policies for causing ill to society is the methodology of a sociopath with psychopathic disorder.

Psychopath: a person with a psychopathic personality, which manifests as amoraland antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc.

Think about the Rush Limbaughs of the world, who with his multiple failed marriages still feels it’s his right and responsibility to tell women how to live and what to do with their bodies. Or Bill O’Reilly, caught in multiple lies about his journalistic history, and yet he claims to operate in a “No Spin Zone.”

These are manipulations of image that exhibit sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies. And yet millions of people buy their schtick and pipe up with “dittos!” to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.

This is the socialism of sociopathy. It’s a sickness American needs to cure. But there’s a problem in that people with the illness seldom recognize it in themselves. And so they vote even against their own interests just so the person who appears to be below them on the social ladder will not get a leg up. That’s the socialism of sociopathy.

America is a sick place sometimes.

Genesisfix's Blog

On religion and politics

Christian Nationalism is Christianity’s enemy

The socialism of sociopathy