I do not keep secret that I am a recovering evangelical. My evangelical roots will always be residual in my personality, my style and manner of life. The past, however it might have been, continues to reverberate through us. (Just a note of gratitude, – without a past you and I would not be here at all) Americans, in so far as we acknowledge a core history and culture are the descendants of Englishmen immigrating to New England, as well as to the Southern states on the Eastern seaboard. All of us are influenced, have inherited the effects of this legacy. And so it goes…

Of late I have struggled most with the conundrum of the stampede of evangelical support to the Trump-anti-democratic ideology. The paradox of combining the teaching of radical openness, of cultivation of mutual respect for others as per the teachings of Jesus, with the bone-deep hostility, the intention to repress and scapegoat the “other,” – females needing reproductive medical care, the immigrant, the non-binary gendered individuals is mind-bending, frankly just cruel!  Still, is that all there is to be said about this hybrid chimera of Christian nationalism, its embodiment in Trump?

Could this be a rest-stop, a necessary interlude on the way to a more humanized, a more spiritual America? Maybe! Surely time will tell…

Nietzsche had this to say…

It is characteristic
of an unphilosophical race like this
to firmly support Christianity: they need its discipline
to be “moralized” and in some sense humanized.

It is just because the English [Americans] are gloomier, stronger-willed,
more sensuous, and more brutal than the Germans
that they, as the baser of the two,
are the more pious as well:
they need Christianity that much more.

To subtler nostrils,
even this English Christianity bears the genuinely English odor
of the very spleen and alcoholic dissipation
against which it is rightly used as a remedy,
– the subtler poison treating the cruder.

In fact, a subtler poisoning is a sign of progress in crude peoples;
it is a step towards spiritualization.

The English crudeness and peasant-like seriousness
is most tolerably disguised
(or better: explained and reinterpreted)
by Christian gestures, prayers, and psalm-singing.

And for that herd of drunken and dissipated cows
who in the past learned to grunt morally
under the influence of Methodism
and again more recently as a “salvation army,”
– for them, a penitential spasm
just might be the highest level of “humanity” that they can attain:
that much you can allow.

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 252