Title : Trump, Christianity and the occult
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Trump, Christianity and the occult
When Christianity Today's editor, Mark Galli, called for Trump's removal from office, I was gratified -- though I knew that his sentiment would have little impact in the evangelical world. Sure enough, Franklin Graham has offered a furious response (on Facebook -- how typical!), full of invective and name-calling while avoiding the substantive issues that Galli laid out. Example:
Christianity Today said it’s time to call a spade a spade. The spade is this—Christianity Today has been used by the left for their political agenda. It’s obvious that Christianity Today has moved to the left and is representing the elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism.This is, of course, pure argumentum ad hominem. Utterly illogical and meaningless.
In the modern world, evangelical Christianity has become a rationalization machine. These people devote all of their craft and cunning to concocting justifications for the dictates of their own Ids, and they don't give even a fleck of fecal matter about your accusations of hypocrisy. Principle means nothing to them; they are devoted to Dear Leader and that is that.
In this context, it may be as well to reproduce some words originally published in 2017.
* * *
Trump is on record as saying that he has never asked for forgiveness because he does not believe that he has done anything requiring forgiveness. There are many versions of Christian theology, and Trump's statement is permissible in exactly none of them. Trump has, in essence, proclaimed his un-Christianity. The guy might as well have written 666 on his forehead while sacrificing a goat.
Yet he remains popular among evangelicals. Yesterday, Kurt Eichenwald addressed this bizarre situation. I would like to translate his tweets into conventional prose:
The evangelical movement is a dead group walking. Its biblically ignorant, hate-filled and hypocritical followers have destroyed any credibility it may have ever had. They have pretended for years they are about the Bible and God. They have proved they are just a group of hypocrites who use "GOP" as a substitute to "GOD." There are some whose faith is beyond question - like @EWErickson. But others are frauds. Young people see that, which is why they're peeling away.The Old Testament verse referenced above was the one containing the phrase "an eye for an eye." Trump:
These "faithful" had a choice between a woman who teaches Sunday school and a guy who was in two porns, could not name books of the Bible, cited as his favorite phrase in the Bible an Old Testament verse which is LITERALLY the only one specifically repudiated by Jesus in the New Testament. He attends no church, and before he started running, declared that "The Art of the Deal" was his favorite book, followed by the Bible.
If evangelists wanted to vote for him and say "his policies are what I support," fine. But they still pretend it has something to do with their religious faith. They say "He's a good Christian" - a phrase they now show has no meaning in their lexicon. The evangelicals will never recover from their demonstration of hateful hypocrisy. They have shown themselves -- politically -- for what they are.
So remember, evangelicals: Every time you say Trump is Godly, you stick another dagger in your movement by demonstrating its meaninglessness.
That's not a particularly nice thing. But you know, if you look at what's happening to our country, I mean, when you see what's going on with our country, how people are taking advantage of us ... we have to be firm and have to be very strong.Jesus:
You have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee on thy right cheek, turn to him also the other.I'm sure that evangelicals will offer some inane verbal formulation which -- in their minds -- can resolve this obvious contradiction between Trump's words and the Sermon on the Mount. (If pressed, I could come up such a formulation myself, purely as an exercise in creative thinking.) Fundamentalist religion always offers the brutes a rationale to justify their brutishness.
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Trumpism and the occult. Steve Bannon oversaw the campaign that brought Trump to the White House, and Trump -- for a while -- brought Bannon into the White House. Bannon, for his part, is a big fan of Julius Evola, the fascist philosopher who has a prominent place in any history of occultism in the 20th century. From Wikipedia:
Around 1920, Evola's interests led him into spiritual, transcendental, and "supra-rational" studies. He began reading various esoteric texts and gradually delved deeper into the occult, alchemy, magic, and Oriental studies, particularly Tibetan Tantric yoga. A keen mountaineer, Evola described the experience as a source of revelatory spiritual experiences. After his return from the war, Evola experimented with hallucinogens and magic.
Evola wrote prodigiously on Eastern mysticism, Tantra, hermeticism, the myth of the Holy Grail and Western esotericism.[6][page needed] German Egyptologist and esoteric scholar Florian Ebeling has noted that Evola's The Hermetic Tradition is viewed as an "extremely important work on Hermeticism" in the eyes of esotericists.[44] Evola gave particular focus to Cesare della Riviera's text Il Mondo Magico degli Heroi, which he later republished in modern Italian. He held that Riviera's text was consonant with the goals of "high magic" – the reshaping of the earthly human into a transcendental 'god man'. According to Evola, the alleged "timeless" Traditional science was able to come to lucid expression through this text, in spite of the "coverings" added to it to prevent accusations from the church.[45] Though Evola rejected Carl Jung's interpretation of alchemy, Jung described Evola's The Hermetic Tradition as a "magisterial account of Hermetic philosophy".[45] In Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, the philosopher Glenn Alexander Magee favored Evola's interpretation over that of Jung's.[46] In 1988, a journal devoted to Hermetic thought published a section of Evola's book and described it as "Luciferian."And so on. Can you imagine the uproar in evangelical circles if Obama's campaign had been headed by an Evola disciple?
Oddly enough, there is evidence that Trump's entire campaign constituted a kind of occult ritual. That statement may seem absurd, but Gary Lachman -- formerly a musician, now a noted historian of esoteric thought -- tracked what we might call "Alt Right occultism" in real time throughout the 2016 campaign. In areas of the internet where rational-minded folk rarely visit, Alt Rightists saw the campaign as a kind of group working, as an experiment in ceremonial magic.
Absurd? Don't judge until you've read Lachman's book. At the very least, you should listen to the interview given above. Here's a longer discussion.
Trump's hardcore followers have evinced an attitude toward religion which may, at first, seem unfathomable and contradictory. Until recently, many on the Alt Right held to a philosophy of libertarian atheism, familiar to us from the writings of Ayn Ran. Being young, haughty, ill-read and pretentious, these libertarians embraced all of the sillier trends in pop impiety, such the "mythicist" view of Jesus' historicity. Well, anyone who has read Flannery O'Connor could have guessed what would happen next: Their atheism eventually seeped out of them like milk trickling out of a punctured container. Turns out there's only so much you can do with atheism; it gets boring after a while.
Some turned to esoterica, while other turned to a very orthodox and unforgiving form of Christianity, which often manifested as capital-O Orthodox Christianity. (Here we see the Russian influence at work.) The converts argued against the wall separating Church and state, and rationalized their new embrace of that old time religion with vague mutterings about "Western Tradition." (The moment you see the T-word capitalized, you know you're dealing with a fascist-in-disguise.) Paradoxically, some Alt Right thinkers embraced both Evola-style hermeticism and a pre-Enlightenment Christian theocracy. Traditional faith is considered necessary for the masses, who, without religion, might rebel against their masters. Esotericism is for the elite, for the Bannons of this world.
In other words, leading Alt Rightist thinkers are both elitists and occultists -- characteristics which right-wing conspiracy theorists traditionally ascribe to the left (without citing any evidence).
On a later date, I might compose a longer essay about all of this, offering links and citations and all of the scholarly niceties. Someone should write a book about this material. Actually, I should write that book -- but I always have about three or four books going simultaneously, and I never finish them.
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