Thread by @JYSexton

How did Donald Trump gain a cultish following?

The answer lies in the history of the Neo-Confederate white identity movement that formed as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and, strangely enough, the bizarre occult beliefs of Ronald Reagan.

themuckrake.com/blog/a-faulty-…

What most people don't know is that Jerry Falwell and other Southern evangelicals, ancestors of the Confederates who based their dystopia on religious beliefs of a racist god, actively pushed Christianity away from charity and social justice to a worship of wealth and power.

This created a new Prosperity Gospel in the United States, a religion that focused on how white supremacy replicated itself and deigned that success was God's will. It probably wouldn't shock anyone to know that Donald Trump was an ARDENT believer in this.

The Reagan occult story is bizarre. As a citizen of New Age California, Reagan believed America was created by a series of secret societies and the Shining City on the Hill evolved from a belief that God had personally intervened in the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Reagan's guru in California was a strange man named Manly P. Hall who made a fortune traveling California and telling the wealthy they were part of an ancient plan come full circle. Reagan' partnership with the white identity Evangelicals created a toxic, occult stew.

What Reagan and the Neo-Confederate white identity evangelicals created was a surreal nightmare world where America was engaged in an apocalyptic battle with the forces of evil, which included a satanic mixture of supernatural powers, liberals, and minorities.

The final result is a world where white identity evangelicals see the pursuit of wealth and power as the will of God and those who are poor are not only wicked but determined to destroy God's creation. In this twisted view, we have Trump as a faulty messiah and warrior.

Members of this cult, which I call the Cult of the Shining City, have no idea they're in it or what the origins of their belief are. I didn't as a kid and am only piecing it together now. But this is how we got here, how Donald Trump became a living god to these people.

Here's Donald Trump with Norman Vincent Peale, the originator of the Christian prosperity belief in "positive thinking" that helped turn the faith toward wealth and personal fulfillment over social justice. Peale officiated Trump's first wedding.

Everyone likes to say Trump isn't religious, which is sort of true. He believes deeply in the Prosperity Gospel and the tenets of the Shining City Myth. Obviously he thinks the poor and liberals are evil, which are pillars of this belief and hide the Neo-Confederate faith.

It's a mystery hidden in plain sight, and those of us who grew up in the Cult of the Shining City faith, those who were in the evangelical church and didn't understand, recognize it. But you have to search the history to unlock what's happened and why we're in this crisis.

For those who want horrified, go search Jerry Falwell and segregation. His personal dislike for MLK led to the spread of private schools to maintain segregation and influenced the move from Christianity as a social-justice faith to personal empowerment.

All of it, including the modern Cult of the Shining City white identity evangelical church, echoes the teachings of Confederate era churches which positioned the CSA as God's chosen project and abolition as the Devil's plot and against God's will. It's all there.

Of white supremacy and segregation, Falwell preached "Where God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line." In his sermons he terrified his parishioners with stories of white women in the North living with African American men.

Now everyone likes to pretend that the Evangelical Right sprung from anti-abortion mobilization, but that's not true. The original spur was MLK and Civil Rights. This is an expressly Neo-Confederate, white identity movement that hijacked a religion and now worships wealth.