Movie Shows So-Called Xians Are Anything But. America’s In Trouble

We may laugh at the overt hypocrisy of many White Evangelicals and they are comical, so it makes sense that we do so. When Paula White was chanting in tongues and proclaiming that “legions of angels” “out of Africa, out of Africa” were coming to influence the vote in favor of a losing Donald Trump, it was overtly comical. But there is a sinister side to all this, the Christian Nationalist movement, that is not funny. A documentary was released on Apple TV and Amazon Prime this past Friday, Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War On Democracy, which delineates both the unholy plans of a church which is anything but Christian, and how it intersects with MAGA and far right-wing politics.

Naturally, the Mango Messiah is featured prominently. We see him for who and what he is, which is a tabloid creation, born to wealth, and totally crooked. He isn’t facing criminal trials in four different jurisdictions for nothing. But the White Evangelicals are a certain sect of MAGA and their brainwashing is complete. And you will recognize the cast of characters that brought this about, unfortunately, every last one of them.

The film draws a compelling through line from the scheming power-building of Paul Weyrich, the right-wing operative who recruited Jerry Falwell and other evangelical preachers to create the religious-right as a political movement in the late 1970s, to the institution-destroying antidemocratic ambitions of MAGA insiders like Steve Bannon, as well as Donald Trump’s dominionist “prophets” and “apostles” and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists they inspired.

As Owen Gleiberman noted in a review for Variety, “what sounded like crackpot raving” from Weyrich’s tear-it-all-down manifesto 15 years ago is “now the cutting edge of the mainstream Republican Party.”

“Bad Faith” explains how that transformation happened, documenting the role played by the Council for National Policy, a partnership between anti-regulation, economically libertarian oil barons and the religious-right leaders who intended to remake the Republican Party, take over the Supreme Court, and use their political power to enforce “traditional” views of family, sexuality, and gender on the rest of the nation.

The Koch brothers poured tens of millions of dollars into “a state-of-the-art political data platform” that Council for National Policy groups use to collect personal information—including personal mental health, behavioral health, and treatment data—and use that information to micro-target individuals. (In “God & Country,” another documentary released earlier this year, Ralph Reed is shown bragging that his organization tracked “147 different data points” on the conservative Christians they targeted for turnout operations.)

One thing I realized when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, to my horror and so many others’, was that if I had only been watching Right Wing Watch or reading right-wing media, I would have seen this coming. Some people did. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore was one of them. He predicted that Trump would win and why. He saw the problems in the rust belt and knew Hillary would lose there.

I also found out after the fact that Democrats in certain states, such as Michigan, had simply stopped spending on Clinton’s campaign. I guess those states were deemed already lost. I also found out after the fact, as did we all when Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Congress, that Russian bots masqueraded as the neighbors and put together a massive anti-Hillary campaign on Facebook.

Point being, once bitten twice shy. Now there are a lot of us who monitor right-wing media and who know exactly what lies are being disseminated out there. Make no mistake, the *Christian” Nationalists are dangerous people.

Here’s my favorite You Tube video, showing Paula White making a fool out of herself. And yes, it is comical. But the fact that this woman is ridiculous should not cause you to underestimate her or the destruction that she is capable of. We could be living in a fascist theocracy as soon as 2025 if the presidential election goes south and that is no laughing matter.

And again I ask, if anybody has any idea who that lost actor is, who keeps upstaging Paula White as he wanders back and forth, script in hand, please let me know. I’ve been wondering for years.