Every time that there is a civil rights movement of any sort, there is a backlash. Beginning with the French Revolution and the English statesman Edmund Burke, reactionary conservatism is the defense of the elite wrapped in a veneer of being for the common person. Burke’s pathos would carry on to our modern ‘right-wing’: being inspired by a hostility towards the elevation of lower orders. These lower orders could be whole swaths of people, such as the caste system of India, a certain gender, or people who merely look different, such as ongoing racism against the African diaspora. Regardless of if the conservative is for the free market or not, for or against the state, or religious or not, there is one through line, an unmitigated desire to defend power and prostrate itself before privilege.
In Revelation, the female embodiment of Babylon is described as being dressed in fine clothes colored in expensive dyes and dripping with golden jewelry. Romans 1 contains a passage that, I feel, is improperly cited as a condemnation against homosexuality. Unrighteousness is summed up with each example: claiming to know God, to be wise, lust, serving the “creature”, being shameless, evil, covetousness, malice; envy, murder, strife, deceit..
I think it is easy to see where we fall short. Because we have free will, we all fall prey to these things time and again and we can only ever try to do and be better. Yet, I think it is also fairly obvious which cohort of modern humankind embodies the sort of unrighteousness written of in the apostle Paul’s letters. God made each and every one of us, but the fallen Morningstar has seen into the hearts of a select few and found purchase there: Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Rachele Mussolini in Italy, Donald Trump of the United States.
Like the “prostitute of Babylon”, these figures are clad in gold, claiming they are members of the commons while wrapped in expensive designer clothes. Many of them have several marriages, though they primarily lust for wealth and power, serving themselves first and foremost while encouraging their followers to be shameless in their malice towards anyone that is not themselves, regardless of if those others are also the children of God.
Jesus would never have accepted this sort of behavior. 2 John 7 spells out fairly plainly that those who deny Christ are the Antichrist; I feel that claiming to know Him and then blatantly going against His teachings is denial. In Donald Trump’s case, the man seems to think he is a fair substitute to Jesus. The imagined persecution and oppression, his constant claim of being crucified by the “lame-stream media”, his promises that, should he ascend, he will be his followers’ retribution. This is strife. This is covetousness. This is evil.
According to the Washington Post, during his tenure as president, Trump lied a monumental 30,573 times. John 8:44 reads, “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for his a liar and the father of lies.” Reactionary conservatism craves lies and murder. From Duterte’s extra-judicial killings of drug users to Trump’s statement that he could kill someone on fifth avenue and get away with it, not only are the leaders of this movement devilish monsters, their followers are in their thrall. And there are a lot of them.
All of this is to say that I feel we need to make a bulwark of goodness until these arch-devils are disposed of and their followers are either vanquished or return to their senses. There is no reason for us to surrender to these people, to allow them to have their way with the world. The reactionary right is comprised of a relatively small enclave of people with a great deal of wealth and a horde of tortured souls being used as cannon fodder.
However, more and more people will fall victim to Mussolini and her ilk if we don’t provide for them. I believe the common man’s attraction to authoritarian personalities is born via trauma. A man may have been literally beaten into believing men can only behave one particular way, that they have to be staunch, silent providers. Their fathers traumatize them and then, when the world changes (as it does between generations), and they are unable to fit into this narrow definition of manhood, they throw their lot in with someone who promises them that they can fix it. That they can reverse the clock and turn us back to a time when everything was “as it is supposed to be” is a vaporous pipe dream. There is only forward and we can go forward either with kindness and love or with violence and anger.
I pray to be able to keep this from happening to our boys today. If you have concern about a man in your life, big or small, please refer them to our Men’s Corps. If you have concern about things that seem so overwhelmingly big and complex that you think you couldn’t possibly fix them, join the Church. I can’t promise that we’ll fix the problem, and I absolutely won’t promise that I can make life any less complex, but I can promise I will try until my last breath to make the problems and the complexity more weatherable.
Sincerely,
Lady Sun