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| Snake handling at the Church of God with Signs Following at Lejunior in Harlan County, Kentucky, 15 September 1946 (NARA). Photo by Russell Lee |
by Hal Brown
Last light as I was about to go to sleep I was listening to an NPR show about Christian Nationalism and they described a woman whose fairly large cult believed if they could get enough people to march seven times (the number appears several times in the Bible) around state capitol buildings God would destroy them. I couldn't find find a reference on the Internet so I asked in a comment to the HUFFPOST article below and got my answer in a half hour. It's The Jericho March, described here on Wikipedia. Of course they have a website. Either wittingly or unwittingly they ended up with the same name as a group that was trying to do a good thing.
Then I came across a couple of articles which went even further into how beyond the "mere" notion that America had to be a Christian nation this had become. Everyone is welcome in the Christian Nationalism group no matter how deranged their beliefs are. This includes QAnon believers. Among those attending the tour event were fans of InfoWars and of Tucker Carlson.
Of course believing that God will kill, literally kill, a group of people that all happen to be enemies of Donald Trump is just a lunatic belief.
Aside from Christopher Mathias who wrote the HUFFPOST article I think you can be quite sure that unless another journalist snuck in everyone there was full-on Trump cult MAGA.
I read this and learned more about the fringes of Christian Nationalism:
This article is about Doug Mastriano's appearance at a Great Reawakening Tour event. There's a lot to unpack about the movement in the article aside from the fact that he is associating himself with these people.
Excepts:
- The “Seven Mountains Mandate” is at the core of the New Apostolic Reformation. This relatively new evangelical movement believes in miracles, the supernatural, and the existence of modern-day apostles and prophets. It’s a movement characterized by Christian dominionism, the belief that Christians must gain control of the “seven mountains” of societal influence to form a perfect world. Only then, the prophecy goes, can Christ return to Earth.
- They are sometimes violent too, like her prophecy that God — any minute now — is going to strike down Democratic politicians “for their planned pandemic, shortages, inflation, mandates and for stealing an election.” She has also falsely alleged that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “loves to drink the little children’s blood” and that the federal government is performing “human sacrifices.”
- From a speaker at the conference Julie Green: “Says God, ‘you can’t stop my son, who is the rightful president, and his name is President Donald Trump…” she said, as the crowd broke into hysterical cheers. “He is on his way back, and how he takes his position back on center stage, you will never see that coming because you won’t see me coming. And I am with him.’” Green said that Trump’s return to the White House might happen before 2024. “God said he can take this country back in unconventional ways. He doesn’t need an election to do it,” she added.
- When you peel away all the “genuinely batshit crazy prophetic aspects,” LeCaque (a professor of history) explained, QAnon at its core is a “mass murder fantasy” about the coming “storm” when all of the MAGA movement’s enemies will be arrested and lynched.
Above: A woman at the Great ReAwakening event shows off a shirt mapping out underground tunnels across the U.S. where she believes the Illuminati are harvesting children's blood.
Eric Trump also was a featured speaker at this event, in fact I suppose you could say so was his father because he put a phone call with him on his speaker phone. There's a HUFFPOST article complete with a video about this.
Here's a hit list of people marked for death by the end of the year. I suppose it's for God, no make that the Angel of Death no doubt on orders from God. It was promoted at a the tour event:
We know from what motivates people to commit acts of violence is often an idea supported by a fringe group and they can be prompted to acts because they think it will make them a hero or feeds into their paranoid delusions, or both. Would anyone be surprised if someone follows David DePape's example and tries to kill one of the people shown above?
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