The Interchangeability Of Mass movements: Evangelical Christianity Over To Trumpism

The heart of all political, religious and social mass movements depends on a core of fanatical — true believer — personalities to supply the energy needed to power a certainty of creed. Now, true believers can never be persuaded by reason, facts or truth to switch from one to another cause. Even if all the angels in heaven were to descend upon them and say that what they believed was false, true believers would close their eyes and plug their ears for these emissaries of heaven would not deserve to be either seen or heard.

It is, however, possible to convert true believer types, as in the Biblical conversion of Saul to Paul. All hinges on the intensity of the new cause offered being of a greater intensity than old one, none of it having anything what so ever to do with the new cause offering a superior truth.

True believes are folks who have lost faith in them-selves and as such are only interest in losing themselves within an overpowering mass movement in order to hide from a badly fractured ego. Indeed, with truth believers, insulation from reality is the name of the game.

In one of the greatest books ever written on the psychology of mass movements, The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer; in it Hoffer explains: “It is rare for a mass movement to be wholly of one character. Usually it displays some facets of other types of movements and some times it is two or three movements in one” (By the way for anyone interested in understanding what drives societies to do all the illogical crap that they do, Hoffer’s little gem of a book, The True Believer, needs to become your Bible of authenticity.)

For numerous years the Republican Party has been pandering to true believer fanatics of a most unstable kind. And now the Trump clan is busy merging evermore a misfit mixture of religious extremists and bigoted White nationalists into a concoction meant to serve Trump and his merry band of greedy cons, all of it being super charged by Fox “News” and it “conservative” social media offspring.

So confident have the Trump’s become that Donald Junior has actually dared to attack, head on, the basic creed of Christianity — Jesus’ preaching of love and forgiveness, replacing it with the old testament meme of an eye for an eye, or what is the preferred creed of hate and vengeance that is the Trump way.

Hate, not love, being the most powerful of unifying agent, it has always been the central theme of Trump world’s organizing principle. (See Peter Wehner reports in The Atlantic on this perversion of the Jesus message and Trumpism’s destruction of civility.

You might think that telling the evangelical base that Jesus was a useless wimp would be the kiss of death for the Trump movement. But no one of sense has ever said that fanatics formimg the heart and soul of mass movements are rational folks. To employ a pun here, hate Trumps all. Though it won’t have been the first time within conservative Christianity that love and understanding have been pushed aside for greed, power and hate.

I understand that unlike his father, Billy Graham, who thruly believed what he preached about the Jesus Gospels, son Franklin Graham is a strong follower of the phonyTrumps. And by the looks of his TV commercials, ostensibly offering prayer for hope, but really done as a con for gaining bucks from among the most pathetically desperate souls going, it seems like Franklin could be an especially useful tool for converting the faithful to Trumpism.

So here it is thinking people of America, as long as truth, facts and logic are not in evidence, any political, religious or social mass movement can be morphed into any other movement when fanatical true believers are ripe for the harvest.