"This was not a church service. It was worship for a new kind of congregation: a right-wing political movement powered by divine purpose..."

"... whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action. The Christian right has been intertwined with American conservatism for decades, culminating in the Trump era. And elements of Christian culture have long been present at political rallies. But worship, a sacred act showing devotion to God expressed through movement, song or prayer, was largely reserved for church. Now, many believers are importing their worship of God, with all its intensity, emotion and ambitions, to their political life.... 'What is refreshing for me is, this isn’t at all related to church, but we are talking about God,' said Patty Castillo Porter, who attended the Phoenix event... [One woman, Tami Jackson, said] 'This is a Jesus movement.... I believe God removed Donald for a time, so the church would wake up and have confidence in itself again to take our country back.'"

From "The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right: ‘This Is a Jesus Movement’/Rituals of Christian worship have become embedded in conservative rallies, as praise music and prayer blend with political anger over vaccines and the 2020 election" by Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham (NYT).

Is this something new or is this how Americans generally behave? I tend to think the latter, but rather than musing on that topic, I just want to publish this quickly because I can see that I've got tags that will pull up whatever I've blogged about this sort of thing over the years.

"It shall be the policy of the United States to establish a statuary park named the National Garden of American Heroes... All statues... should be lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations."

"The National Garden should be located on a site of natural beauty that enables visitors to enjoy nature, walk among the statues, and be inspired to learn about great figures of America’s history. The site should be proximate to at least one major population center, and the site should not cause significant disruption to the local community."

From Trump's "Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes."

These realistic statues must be of "historically significant Americans" and "Americans" is deemed to include those who "lived prior to or during the American Revolution and were not American citizens, but who made substantive historical contributions to the discovery, development, or independence of the future United States." In that category, he names Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra, and the Marquis de La Fayette.

There's a list of the kinds of people who are deemed to "have contributed positively to America." The list includes "opponents of national socialism or international socialism" — a phrase that must rankle the hell out of present-day American socialists — e.g., Bernie Sanders. It implies that no socialist can be among the heroes — only opponents of socialism. What about James Baldwin? Woody Guthrie? Noam Chomsky? W.E.B. Du Bois? Kurt Vonnegut? Madalyn Murray O'Hair? Gloria Steinem? Pete Seeger? Margaret Sanger? Paul Robeson? Dorothy Parker?

Who are your heroes? Who are mine? I tend to eschew idolatry, but if we're going to make a list of American heroes, I want the left wing represented.

And speaking of idolatry, is anyone talking about the impact of this sculpture garden on people who have a strong moral or religious opposition to statues? I'm thinking in particular of Muslims. From the Wikipedia article, "Aniconism in Islam":

Aniconism is the avoidance of images of sentient beings in some forms of Islamic art. Islamic aniconism stems in part from the prohibition of idolatry and in part from the belief that creation of living forms is God's prerogative. Although the Quran does not explicitly prohibit visual representation of any living being, it uses the word musawwir (maker of forms, artist) as an epithet of God. The corpus of hadith (sayings attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad) contains more explicit prohibitions of images of living beings, challenging painters [who] "breathe life" into their images and threatening them with punishment on the Day of Judgment....

Note that Trump's requirement that the statues be "lifelike or realistic" mandates the very quality that is the problem for Muslims (who have traditionally sought ways to depict human beings without competing with God, the maker of forms).

I need to "live-blog" my reading of Trump's 4th of July speech.

Here's the transcript from what was called the “Salute to America” at the White House yesterday.

As I said in the previous post, I think Trump went big introducing a strong campaign theme this weekend, setting himself up in opposition to the protesters who've been ripping down statues, and I looked at Biden's 4th-of-July speech — speechlet — and judged it to be smack dab in the middle of a continuum that runs from Trump to the statue topplers.

Yesterday, I "live-blogged" my reading of Trump's July 3rd speech — the Mount Rushmore speech, so now I feel that I need to live-blog my reading of Trump's 4th-of-July speech. Blogging is a strange compulsion, where I don't really have to do a damned thing I don't want to do. That's what's so compelling about it, paradoxically.

I'm reading the full text as I write, but I'm not quoting every word of it. Unlike the Mount Rushmore speech, I did watch some of this one.

Thanks to the courage of those patriots on July 4th, 1776, the American Republic stands today as the greatest, most exceptional, and most virtuous nation in the history of the world. Our workers, our factories have revolutionized industries and lifted millions into prosperity. Our artists, architects, and engineers have inspired the globe with transcendent works of beauty. American heroes defeated the Nazis, dethroned the fascists, toppled the communists, saved American values, upheld American principles, and chased down the terrorists to the very ends of the earth.

American exceptionalism. America is great. A fantastic treasure that must be preserved. Noted.

We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who, in many instances, have absolutely no clue what they are doing.

Oh, I thought he would say we are now being threatened by the radical left who want to take this all away. But he introduces this cast of characters — America's antagonists — as in the process of getting defeated. And he further minimizes them by saying that a lot of them don't even know what they're doing. They're clueless dummies, following along.

All Americans living today are the heirs of this magnificent legacy. We are the descendants of the most daring and courageous people ever to walk on the face of the Earth. We inherit their towering confidence, unwavering enthusiasm, their unbridled ambition, and their unrelenting optimism....

I suspect that's his opinion of himself too — towering confidence, unwavering enthusiasm... unbridled ambition... unrelenting optimism.

That is why we pay tribute to generations of American heroes whose names have etched on our monuments and memorials and in the pages of history and in the hearts of a very grateful people. We will never allow an angry mob to tear down our statues, erase our history, indoctrinate our children, or trample on our freedoms. We will safeguard our values, traditions, customs, and beliefs. We will teach our children to cherish and adore their country so that they can build its future. 

That's the theme, stated positively, but with the nugget of negativity: There's an "angry mob." We have so much good, and we must protect it from those bad people over there.

"At one point in Betsy West’s and Julie Cohen’s new documentary 'RBG,' NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg claims that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg 'was doing something that was incredibly important to American women.'"

"At the end of 'RBG,' I was still struggling to figure out what Totenberg meant when she said 'something.'.. . West and Cohen certainly believe that Ginsburg is a significant figure, but the evidence they present is ultimately unconvincing.... Throughout the documentary, West and Cohen seem uninterested in undertaking a complex analysis of Ginsburg’s life and work... Various interviewees mention that Ginsburg has a unique ability to cross the political aisle and work with justices who hold opposing views. As proof, they point to her longtime friendship with the late, very conservative justice Antonin Scalia. For many of the interviewees, this is nothing short of a miracle. One of the interviewees claims that Ginsburg is an extraordinary individual because most liberals 'do not have friends who are right-wing nutcases.'...  For West and Cohen, however, Ginsburg’s legacy... is manifested in the pop culture productions Ginsburg has inspired.... West and Cohen seem particularly enamored with Kate McKinnon’s impersonation of Ginsburg; they show the same SNL skit three times during the documentary. Towards the end of the film, West and Cohen screen the sketch for Justice Ginsburg herself, and they ask her what she thinks about it. Ginsburg finds McKinnon’s acting humorous, but concludes that the impersonation doesn’t reflect anything about her at all."

Writes Amir Abou-Jaoude at The Stanford Daily.

The movie "RBG" has a 94% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

ADDED: Here's the one negative review listed at Rotten Tomatoes, from James Berardinelli: "RBG isn’t worth the time and effort of seeking out in a theater unless you’re a die-hard RBG fan. Little in the film can’t be found in Justice Ginsburg’s Wikipedia entry; it functions more as a straightforward (and sanitized) biography than a probing or intriguing examination of one of the nation’s most influential judicial voices."

But you shouldn't look for a movie to be what it's not trying to be. I get the sense, even from Berardinelli, that the movie isn't trying to enlighten us about the work Ginsburg has done, but that it is examining the popular culture, the effect of the idea of Ginsburg on people: "In assessing Ginsburg’s current role on the Court and how she has become a larger-than-life figure to young, socially liberal voters, RGB finds its soundest footing. It shows dozens of memes, talks to several influential under-30 figures, and puzzles over how a tiny, seemingly meek old woman could have become a hero to her granddaughter’s generation."

Here's the poster:



Is there any serious inquiry into the human psychological need for heroes and icons and the adoration of the dissenter?

"These are the last days of Mecca. The pilgrimage is supposed to be a spartan, simple rite of passage..."

"... but it has turned into an experience closer to Las Vegas, which most pilgrims simply can’t afford," says Irfan Al-Alawi, director of the UK-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation. "The city is turning into Mecca-hattan... Everything has been swept away to make way for the incessant march of luxury hotels, which are destroying the sanctity of the place and pricing normal pilgrims out."

The Grand Mosque is now loomed over by the second tallest building in the world.... The hotel rises 600m (2,000ft) into the air, projecting a dazzling green laser-show by night, on a site where an Ottoman fortress once stood – razed for development, along with the hill on which it sat.

The list of heritage crimes goes on, driven by state-endorsed Wahhabism, the hardline interpretation of Islam that perceives historical sites as encouraging sinful idolatry – which spawned the ideology that is now driving Isis’s reign of destruction in Syria and Iraq. In Mecca and Medina, meanwhile, anything that relates to the prophet could be in the bulldozer’s sights. The house of Khadijah, his first wife, was crushed to make way for public lavatories; the house of his companion Abu Bakr is now the site of a Hilton hotel; his grandson’s house was flattened by the king’s palace. Moments from these sites now stands a Paris Hilton store and a gender-segregated Starbucks.

ADDED: Do you think much about the problem of idolatry? It's strange where such thinking leads people, but one reason it is strange is that we've lost touch with idolatry as a significant sin. We use the word "idol" with complete casualness.