christianity

Kirk Effect: On The Goodness Of American Evangelicals

Tim J. Clark Uncategorized , , , ,

Excerpt: Now It’s The Mormons’ Turn And: Our Fragile Economy; Rethinking Comey; Digital IDs; Good Evangelicals; More, Rod Dreher, Sep 29, 2025 (paywalled)

Along those lines, Peggy Noonan had this to say (paywalled) about the Christian Right, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk service:

There is something you could have said at any time the past decade that is true now in some new way. It is that the GOP is becoming a more explicitly Christian party than it ever has been. A big story the past decade was that so many Trump supporters, especially but not only working-class ones, were misunderstood as “those crazy Christians” but in fact were often unaffiliated with any faith tradition and not driven to politics by such commitments.

But it looks to me as if a lot of those folks have been in some larger transit since 2015, as Kirk himself was. He entered the public stage to speak politics but said by the end that his great work was speaking of Christ. If he had a legacy, he told an interviewer, “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.”

The secretary of state of the United States gave personal testimony on what Christ is in history and in his life. The vice president did the same. John Foster Dulles and Hubert Humphrey didn’t talk like this!

The whole thing was self-consciously and explicitly Christian. Kirk’s widow, Erika, talked of new converts and asked the crowd to help them. She said of her husband’s assassin, “That young man—I forgive him.” And she received a standing ovation.

As I watched I realized: This is the true sound and tone of the Republican Party right now. This is the takeover of the previously patronized.

She added that when she worked in the Reagan White House as a speechwriter, Christian conservatives had a seat at the table, so to speak, but they were quietly looked down on by the “pragmatists” in the room. No more.

It is no secret that as the GOP has become more religious, the Democrats have become more secular. This is not something you are going to see reflected in media coverage, because US journalists, being overwhelmingly secular liberals, are blind to how their own party has moved to the extreme on religious and cultural matters, just as the Republicans have. I think this is unavoidable, this schism. What you, reader, should watch out for is the attempt to shape the Narrative such that it looks as if religious conservatives are the ones taking America away from Normal. As Bill Maher said in his closing monologue on Friday:

” … there is actually no such thing as atheism”

Tim J. Clark Uncategorized , , , ,

This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio), The Free Press

 

I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.