Judas Iscariot Had God On His Side

It goes without saying that the phrase “it goes without saying” is unwisely presumptive in an age of disinformation, but I think I’m safe in assuming you all know that the US regime’s Christian Nationalist justification for everything from oil wars to abortion bans is no more sincere than previous pretexts for state sponsored atrocity. It’s just a great deal more unhinged than their usual specious arguments for protecting the people from terrorism or Communism, and impossible to challenge in a rational debate since rationality has left the building and been driven away in an unmarked car.

Neither is this a new manipulation of faith and patriotism; the phrase “In God We Trust” was first minted into coins back in 1863 at the urging of a Unionist pastor named Mark R. Watkinson, to counteract the Confederacy’s claim to Christian legitimacy. Even then, a New York Times editorial wrote, “let us try to carry our religion—such as it is—in our hearts, and not in our pockets.” But in 1954 the phrase was commandeered by the architects of America’s ongoing human rights rollback, who sought to use Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare to undo The First Amendment’s insistence on a separation of church and state. While the ineffectual Eisenhower was privately repulsed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was in thrall to the evangelist Billy Graham who convinced the freshly baptised president that the Cold War was, in reality, a biblical battle between good and evil that required a nationwide spiritual revival to win. With the backing of William Randolph Hearst’s media empire, Graham’s stadium-based crusades became the rallying ground for a new religious right, while Dwight ensured “In God We Trust” was added to bank notes and stamps. In 1956 Congress passed a resolution enshrining it as the official government motto, and six years later they carved it into the marble above the Speaker’s chair in protest at the Supreme Court’s ruling that mandated school prayers were unconstitutional. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin Graham is now one of Trump’s closest advisors.

The homophobic, anti-abortion, anti-IVF, anti-divorce, Islamophobic, Christian Nationalist Mike Johnson - who currently sits under the In God We Trust slogan - adheres to a fringe belief that the second coming of Jesus will only occur when Jewish sovereignty is re-established in the Levant. This deeply weird adopter of a mysterious teenage boy, and man who felt comfortable telling the country he and his birth son monitor each other’s use of Internet porn, and who proudly sent his 13-year-old daughter to a purity ball, believes a footnote in a 1560s translation of the Bible that suggested the Book of Romans might contain a claim that Jews will all converge on Palestine and convert to Christianity in the end times. No one else who either wrote or read any previous translation of Romans thought it said this, only a small group of English Protestants hiding from Queen Mary in Switzerland wondered if it might be something to consider. Unfortunately for the world, their Geneva Bible became a bestseller (and the basis for our more poetic King James Version) and it was this iteration of the ancient scriptures that the Puritans took to North America. So here we fucking are.

There has never been a consensus in the church about the Book of Revelation. No one has ever agreed on what it means or whether it should even have been included in the canon. Is it a contemporary coded letter of encouragement from the Johannine sect of Syria to the persecuted early Christians in Rome (probably) or John The Apostle’s two-thousand-year-old prophecy that sets out the exact events and timeline of a 21st Century apocalypse (probably not)? Either way, it involves the capture of a seven-headed dragon so that’s cool.

If American evangelicals truly believe that bombing schools in the Middle East will be the final straw that brings an angry Jesus back to battle the beast (having slept through countless previous wars, genocides and the Holocaust) that’s their constitutional right. Although even Paul, or the clearly two different men writing letters under the name of Paul, thought the return of The Christ was going to happen in his classical age lifetime (his enthusiasm for celibacy was simply because he didn’t believe disciples had time for sex, with so much of the “Welcome Back Christos!” party planning still to do). But even if their way off this planet really does require one more war in The Holy Land (and any nearby nations with instability and oil reserves) surely you can’t manufacture one to make the messiah mad? God in his infinite wisdom would see through such a ruse.

“Son, it looks like it’s finally time. Remember what I told you, duck and weave and aim for its heads. Hang on a minute… this isn’t a naturally occurring Canaanian conflict at all. It’s just that fascist freak Pete Hegseth playing soldiers, because the worst president of all time is tanking in the polls. Do those simpletons from the mega churches really think that’s how this works? Remind me why I created the USA again. Oh that’s right, I didn’t.”