Confederate Christianity still preaches a racist God

Almost two weeks ago I wrote about the Cult of Trump as laid out by Jared Yates Sexton. He had tweeted a long thread about how the Cult of the Shining City had become the Cult of Trump. In that thread he started in the 1960s with the reaction to MLK and the civil rights movement.

In another thread, this one 67 tweets long, he reaches back further and fills in more detail. America, since its beginning, has been seen as a “Shining City,” one chosen by God to be special. Yeah, a myth, though a powerful one. The Confederacy made that explicit and official.

In Confederate churches, Confederate preachers gave sermons about a racist God who carried out white supremacy as a universal belief and operation. … When the Confederacy lost battles, it was because they had angered their racist God. … Here's the thing: when the Civil War ended, the racist Confederate God didn't just go away. The preachers continued preaching divine white supremacy.

Then in the 1960s Confederate-strain preachers…

They preached that their God had "drawn a line" of segregation and white supremacy. To fight that would be an affront to their racist, Confederate God.
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Without saying it explicitly, white-identity evangelicals had a unifying message: Civil Rights & social progress were the projects of Satan in battling God. Troubling white supremacy meant troubling the racist God's plan. To do so would destroy the world and call God's anger.
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What you need to understand is this: capitalism as it's enshrined in America is white supremacy made law. The people at the top from the beginning were white men. That has held throughout the centuries and capitalism stands as "proof" of white supremacy.

Through Reagan and the Evangelical Right, wealth and power denoted God's will. If you were rich, it was God's reward for being godly. If you were poor, obviously you were a sinner and had failed to find God's will. In this, the Confederate, racist God became a capitalist.
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The Cult of the Shining City told us America, as a godly country, was being attacked by Satan and conspiracies. The conspirators and devilish army?

People of color. Poor people. Women. LGBTQ Americans. Everyone challenging the white patriarchal order.
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Inside the US, the Cult of the Shining City believed anyone questioning America, anyone calling for reform of Reagan's disastrous policies, was secretly part of the conspiracy against America and in league with Satan. They weren't just opponents, they were satanic traitors.

A note: the GOP was well aware of all this. They didn't believe it necessarily, but they used it to their advantage. They played the Cult of the Shining City like an instrument, dropping dog whistles in speeches and their public performance.

Over time, they merged.

After a discussion of religion in Nazi Germany…

This brief journey to Nazi Germany tells us something: religious belief can be seized by anyone and turned into a means of control and power.

All you need to do is to grasp control and use it to your own ends, establishing a new cult of personality.
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The "Deep State" conspiracy theory is the New World Order and the Elders of Zion conspiracy theories made new. [Trump’s] wielding of those paranoid ramblings is a weaponization of the cult's beliefs and fears.

It is a message: I am battling a conspiracy of evil as a messiah.
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The truth is that the Cult of the Shining City is at a terminal point. Their stories are losing their power and are becoming muddled and strange, indecipherable and offputting. This is what happens with cults. They grow and grow and change until they become deadly.

The Cult of the Shining City has been raised to search for the apocalypse, told over and over it's coming, and in a way they're dying to die. They want the End Times now because their country has been poisoned with murderous politics and culture.

This is a death cult.

Watch the coverage now. Evangelicals holding services. Saying they're protected by the blood of Christ from coronavirus. They believe this is a plague sent against the unholy. They believe these are the End Times. They'll kill themselves and take us with them.