I was born in 1961, and in the United States in which I grew up, people were suspicious of extremes. A “zealot” was something you did not want to be, religious or otherwise.
That is why the nation’s turn toward extremism in recent years seems surprising and dismaying.
Especially surprising and alarming is the combination of religious and political zealotry.
According to the article, this movement is on “a mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom [of God] as humanity barrels deeper into the End Times.” Anyone opposed to it is, by definition, opposed to God’s will, which makes them a heretic and invalidates their views (and perhaps their rights).
Its members see Donald Trump and MAGA as instruments for bringing about the kingdom. The feeling is mutual, according to the article. Trump (and Elon Musk) see them as instruments to attain their goal: acquiring political power to enrich themselves and avoid time in jail.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and I do not recall anyone saying that Jesus wanted to create the Kingdom of God as a literal government. I certainly never heard that coercing Christian beliefs and behaviors on other people was advisable. Freedom was a core value: people were free to believe or not, and only those who believed were obligated to follow God’s teachings.
However, the New Apostolic Reformation has other ideas and is intent on creating a theocracy: a government based on their particular version of Christianity. The article states the movement seeks “aggressive social and institutional transformation.”
This strikes me as inherently unAmerican. The article cites a study indicating up to 40 percent of American Christians are part of or approve of the New Apostolic Reformation’s goals. That means they have abandoned freedom.
If freedom is out, then so is democracy.
title of a famous entry in his book Letters from an American Farmer, which was published in 1782. (I assume historian Heather Cox Richardson alludes to this book with the title of her newsletter, Letters from an American.)
Crevecoeur discussed religious fervor in “What is an American?” The American immigrant experience cooled it, and he found that to be a good thing.
One way America was better than Europe (a major topic for him) was “how the various Christian sects introduced wear out, and how religious indifference becomes prevalent.” He said intense religiosity was the source of conflict and division. See how many wars and oppression it had caused in Europe? He described how in a generation or two after immigrants arrived in the colonies, marriages between people of different denominations were common. What people believed was not the concern of others.
He wrote, “How does it concern the welfare of the country… what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen…. This is the visible character, the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.”
Crevecoeur would be sadly surprised to see religious zeal burning again and to see the return of persecution of those who deviate from the beliefs and behaviors of self-appointed divine rulers – health professionals receiving permission to withhold treatment from others because of religious differences, county clerks refusing to process marriage certificates for people to whose lifestyles they object, books being removed from libraries, etc.
Making another person’s beliefs and lifestyle your business leads to trouble, and Crevecoeur celebrated the tolerance he found in America: “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates….”
I wish that were true again.
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