Thread by @Delafina777

just your reminder that the National Prayer Breakfast that every president attends started as a way to get businessmen together to crush labor organizing more effectively

it was organized by Abraham Vereide, a Methodist minister, who didn't like the IWW and was worried they might be getting too much influence with Seattle's local government.

there's really no softer way to put this:

the prayer breakfasts sought out powerful people to meld and conflate three things:
Christianity
power
anti-labor principles

and if you want to understand why the loudest forms of American Christianity today seem to be all about power and reifying social stratification and nothing else, the origins of it start in 1934 with a guy who didn't like unions

and don't, for a moment, think that this getting rolling in the 1930s is an accident or happened in a bubble

socialists and communists were clashing with nazis in europe, and Vereide wanted to position Christianity against the socialists and communists

spiegel.de/international/…

hard to say how much he sympathized with the nazis--after all, most of this information comes from *his group* so they aren't likely to admit it if so

but that group (the Fellowship) today praises nazi techniques for spreading ideology and gaining power, so.

And, like, I dunno how to emphasize this enough: they're PROUD of it. This is from the Billy Graham archives:

www2.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/G…

The explicit, out-in-the-open point here was straight-up power.

And yes, most religious groups want an in with a congressperson or three, most want access to powerful people, as do *any* special interests.

But most want it because their end goal is to be able to do what they do in peace, have a say, do their thing. It's a means to an end.

What's so terrifying about this was that the very explicit, clearly stated end goal was power for its own sake.