Following a national backlash from white supremacists to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights laws of the 1960s and 70s, white fundamentalists finally began to organize. They left the Democratic party throughout the Southern and Middle states and joined with the Republican party to eradicate the feminist-liberal-Black-atheist-Democratic-nonconformist-communist-Nothern elitist-hippie Californian-Hollywood-nontraditionalist threats to the American way of life. Americans bought into it. The enemy was no longer simply a communist sympathizer. The enemy was someone you already disliked and distrusted.
Right wing policies rely on people's fears. When I was out hiking with my father, I sometimes thought I was afraid because we seemed lost. But he taught me that I was afraid because I had not identified the sound or odor. Today, I want my audience to identify the sounds and odors. We’re lost when we’re willingly distracted or misinformed or afraid. We’re able to help ourselves and others when we understand how we got here and where we’re going.
Many are finally saying aloud what has been noticeable and true since the 1980s: Donald J Trump has below average intelligence, is willfully ignorant, and uses school-boy arrogance to deflect. Many are finally saying aloud what has been noticeable and true since 2024: Donald J Trump’s mental health is deteriorating to such an extent that he should not chair his own businesses much less a nation. He is irrational, erratic, and unreliable.
2026 is the year that Christian Believers and American Nonbelievers must take a side. The same side if they believe in justice, empathy, goodness, the Constitution, and liberty.
Americans can be enlightened and strengthened by the Dunkirk Story of 1940. Heroism is a collective effort. Look for the Helpers. Look for the heroes who are among us and in us.
Today's Sunday School Lesson: The old religious studies courses we took for the easy A are no longer valid. America's Christianity is a fractured, weak, sectarian, divided, and splintered religion that survives only to support the far right and the new American fascism. Some sects like Methodists are defying the trend...but it is too little, too late.
Women were united in their ambitious search for freedom and justice prior to the Reagan. This is what happened. The division was purposeful; the Republican party and Christian Nationalists benefited. No group or agenda poses more danger to our democracy than the Christian Nationalists.