Curt Landry is a Trump-lovingright-wing pastor who was among the various âprophetsâ who boldly and explicitly guaranteed that former President Donald Trump would win reelection in 2020.
Landry proclaimed that 2020 would result in a âred tsunamiâ in which Trump won the White House and the GOP won control of both houses of Congress. None of those things happened. In fact, ever after Congress had certified Joe Bidenâs win as president, Landry was positive that God would ensure that Trump remained president, so much so that he declared that he was âmaking arrangementsâ to be in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20 for Trumpâs inauguration.
In the old days no one thought it was at all appropriate to speculate on other people's love life, at least for women, maybe not always the same for men. When I was growing up the house two houses down was owned by two lovely women house mates. My mother told me that her mother commented on how nice it was that aunt Dora had such a good friend that she could live with.
I mean it's not as great as open acceptance but these people should mtofb.
âI got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House committee in Columbus, . Well, guess what? Itâs all true.â
Is the West Becoming Pagan Again? The successor to Christian civilization may resemble the present-day iconoclasm known as wokeness.
(...) Many Americans have a sense that their country is less religious than it used to be. But is it really? The interplay among institutions, behaviors and beliefs is notoriously hard to chart. Even if we could determine that religious sentiment was in flux, it would be hard to say whether we were talking about this yearâs fad or this centuryâs trend.
Or perhaps we are dealing with an even deeper process. That is the argument of a much-discussed book published in Paris this fall. In it, the French political theorist Chantal Delsol contends that we are living through the end of Christian civilization â a civilization that began (roughly) with the Roman rout of pagan holdouts in the late fourth century and ended (roughly) with Pope John XXIIIâs embrace of religious pluralism and the Westâs legalization of abortion.
So if another civilization comes to replace Christianity, it will not be a mere negation, such as atheism or nihilism. It will be a rival civilization with its own logic â or at least its own style of moralizing. It may resemble the present-day iconoclasm that French commentators refer to as le woke. (The term means basically what it does in English, except that French people see wokeness as a system imported wholesale from American universities and thus itself almost a religious doctrine.)
Christianity the religion has teachings about loving oneâs neighbor and turning the other cheek that are impressively clear. For Christianity the culture, though, these can be sources of ambivalence. Christianity has produced some hardened moralizers, to put it mildly. But there has always been a tension between its teachings and its quest for political power.
Ms. Delsol worries that le woke has no such hesitation. Speech codes, elementary school consciousness-raising, corporate public service advertising â in some ways our public order is coming to resemble that of pagan Rome, where religion and morality were separated. Religion was a matter for the household. Morality was determined and imposed by societyâs elites, with grim results for freedom of thought.
Whether or not a society is tolerant of rival ideas has less to do with its leadersâ idle ideological positioning and much more to do with their position in a historical cycle. When in A.D. 384 Christians succeeded in removing the pagan Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate, where it had stood for almost four centuries, the pagan statesman Symmachus understood that Romeâs tolerance would henceforth be denied to those who had built it. If we know Symmachus for one sentiment today, it is his condemnation of Christianityâs dogmatic claims to truth as an affront against common sense. âThere cannot be only one path toward such a great mystery,â he said.
People find such sentiments inspiring. Regimes usually donât. A decade later, the Christian emperor Theodosius was banning the Olympics on the grounds that there was too much nudity in them â without any objections from common sense. The conventional wisdom had come around to dogmatism. It still too often does.
