Baptist populists, the MAGA Base and soul molesting complicity

   Andrew Gardner uploaded a piece April 7 on Baptist populism and the MAGA Base. It ratifies what I have been saying for 35 years now about the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. in 1993 Harold Bloom of Yale wrote in his book The American Religion the tragedy in the SBC is the result of pure political machinations masquerading as religious conviction.

      Five years before that Paul Pressler in the network of Jesse Helms and the Council for National Policy walked off the interview with Bill Moyers when pressed about his Exxon family history with the right wing. Part of it had to do with windfall profit taxes Jimmy Carter ushered in as suggested by Tom Edsall in The New Politics of Inequality. Pressler's network went back to the McCarthy era in culture war politics distraction disquising oil profits.

   Homer Lindsay has a key anecdote in Gardner's telling. Bullying a compromise discussion with the ultra fundies on the seminaries, he called them chickens for backing off hardline notions. One of his key parishioners at FBC Jacksonville Florida was Tim Tebow's Mother, the Eagle Forum Woman of the Year for 2018

   See Jill Lepore These Truths to put the Eagle Forum in context over the SBC takeover years and check the index for Frank Norris and Baptist populism of Billy Sunday's Day.

        Bill Friday UNC chanclellor told Cecil Sherman the most significant development of the 1980s in North Carolina was the Helms Baptists of the CNP ouster of Randall Lolley as president of Southeastern Baptist Seminary in the town of Wake Forest cause Helms Pressler network knew if they could get in the heads of Baptist preachers in culture war politics they could sway that region of the country to the Right for a generation.   

     Google Robert Jones shutting down CRT debate religion news. It is a sordid tale how race baiting politics evolved into the MAGA politics of Abortion, guns and now immigration. It is chocked full of mendacity SBC and now National MAGA politics.

      Read Gardner and do you your best to distinguish between your ASS and a Hole in the Ground when it comes to Jesus and MAGA SBC Politics

      

        

Dabo Swinney Upstate mega church Newspring goes liberal on Women

About twenty years after President Carter figured it out Dabo Swinney mega church in Clemson and Anderson SC, two campuses, broke with the Southern Baptist Convention and their third world view on women. Somebody outted Meredith Knox on their staff as a "teaching minister" and that was all she wrote. Who knows if the congregation will start consulting Baptist News Global on a weekly basie or religion dispatches, but once you start thinking a little there aint no going back.

      Better for them Than the hard core Super Trumper Church of the Highlands in Bama with congregations from Tuscaloosa to Gadsden. Those Bastards ( check the Old Testament cause it defines them) and their 25 ccampuses are hard core fundamentalists hard wired to Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk. They are proud of it.

     First Baptist Church Spartanburg with Trey Gowdy is almost as bad and Dabo wwill have to talk to his trustee Nikki Haley cause like Highlands, she has embraced Kirk and TPUSA.

    Nick Saban gave a million dollars to his St Francis Catholic student ministry in Tuscaloosa. So now Saban and Dabo are part of congregations Trump defines as the enemy from within.

     So lets have the conversation that matters now the train has left the station and Dabo Swinney is on it.....I think Trevor Lawrence is ready to take it up as well. at least in the off season.