Why are Christian nationalist accounts all using AI-generated images in the same style?

🧵 on propaganda, irony, and moral awakening

These AI generated pictures are actually based on a historic artist, Norman Rockwell, whose illustrations were often featured on Sat. Evening Post covers.

Early in his career (1916) he depicted everyday American life, almost exclusively from the perspective of white Americans.

The very first point of the very first class I took in youth ministry at Liberty University:

“Hitler was the greatest Youth leader of the 20th century”

🧵x12 Let me say: I don’t think this came from any explicit admiration for Nazi Germany.

Instead, it’s was like the wand maker Olivander to Harry Potter on Voldemort: “he did great things—terrible—but great”

But… 1/12

Taking communion in the Capitol might seem bizarre to non-Christians and blasphemous to certain practicing Christians.

But there’s more going on here… 🧵

This act is entirely coherent with the theology of dominion espoused by the New Apostolic Reformation. It evolved out of church growth methods in the mid-20th cent. to include spiritual warfare and charismatic apostolic practices.

Caesar's comet & the birth of Christ... why I don't read the gospel birth narratives the same way I used to.

Thread 🧵 Julius Caesar was murdered in March 44 BCE. His adoptive heir, Caesar Augustus, commemorated JC's reign by hosting games in Rome. During the games, a comet hung in the sky over Rome. It was said the comet was Caesar's soul, ascending to the gods.

“The truth is, Joe Biden did not win with 81 million votes…if you believe he did [win], then you are the conspiracy theorist” — Kari Lake

Thread on paranoid politics and the danger it poses… 🧵

Lake reverses who is a “conspiracy theorist” for mudslinging. Notice how she justifies it. She says…

“We know…” — three times.

She asserts truth apart from fact. This is both political performance & post-truth operation

Here’s how it works and why it’s a danger… 1/12

Conspiracy theories are a feature of nationalism. 🧵

A thread on evangelicals, enemies, and and America. Nationalism is always anxious about the purity & preservation of the national identity and project.

You’ll notice how powerful conspiracy theories like Q appeal to “us vs. them” binaries. This is the same shape as nationalism.

I study US evangelicalism & political conspiracy theories.

Here’s a few things about this weekend’s Trump rally worth mentioning:

Here, Trump is capitalizing once again on old resentments & anxieties, just with different headlines—tyranny, paranoid loss of freedom, cultural replacement. These’ve been a feature for much of US history.

Nationalism is resurgent everywhere, but *Christian* nationalism becoming a political slogan in the States is a warning.

Anti-Reich Christians had this to say in 1934; I think we need it again in 2022… 🧵 /5 Christians in the US need our own Barmen Declaration (1934):

8.18 “We reject the false doctrine, as though the church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.”

The Good Pro-Lifer

“One day Jesus met an evangelical who asked him: Teacher, what does it take to go to heaven?”

🧵 Jesus responded: “you know the commands, love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself. Do this, and you have a place in the Kingdom.”

The evangelical, seeking to justify his culture war resentments, asked: “Yes, this! I’m pro-life! So what about our rights as Americans?”

The book of Revelation wasn’t written to help Christians predict the next world order, the next Babylon. It was written to show the church across time what it means to be Christian in our own Babylons, from Rome to the United States. Ex. Rev 2.9 and 3.9 mention a “Synagogue of Satan”. What is that? It was rooted in a Jewish/Gentile conflict. Jews could pay Rome an exemption tax to participate in economic trade w/o tribute to Roman gods. And so it was advantageous to claim Jewishness to avoid penalties.

White evangelicals will work hard to disassociate the brand from this vision of Christian Nationalism being replayed for the world right now.

I was in these spaces. Here’s how it worked, and how it might evolve. A thread: 🧵 x8 Not shocking: spaces of white evangelicalism echo the GOP, “nothing to see here.”

👉CN is a political invention/theater
👉The rioters were a minority
👉No *true* evangelical was at J6.

These are deflections & distortions for disassociation. 1/8

What needs to happen in a theological autopsy of January 6? A few things…

4 part thread 🧵

https://twitter.com/jaredstacy/status/1534855661917507584

1) A fresh, critical distinction between order & shalom. Hauerwas is right when he says we mistake order for peace. A church committed to order under the guise of peace picks up violence to keep order, which is one way to think theologically about J6.

I think I can shine some explanatory light on Joash’s observation, which as an expat living in Scotland is 🎯

4 part 🧵

https://twitter.com/JoashPThomas/status/1534138851186417665

👉 FYI—identifying as “conservative” right now makes someone nearly 3x as likely to buy into Q-Anon. But think beyond how political conspiracy theories work to shore up “conservative” as a political ideology, towards how ideology and theology in America came together…

Reading letters to the editor from Christianity Today in Dec. 6 1963. Ask, has anything changed? what must change?

“Does the fact the Communists are directing the 'race revolution' automatically mean that evangelical ministers and leaders are to take up the poor Negro's cause?" Another: "We must either stand for justice and love or admit that we lack the courage to do so. As an evangelical who was asked to leave a pulpit because of a conflict of the race problem, I heartily endorse [the article]..."

I’m neck deep in a PhD on conspiracy theories.

4 things worth passing on 🧵

This sort of ethno-centric conspiracy has a long historical shelf life, going back to chattel slavery, and paranoia over enslaved people revolvting… 1/4 1. Conspiracy theories don’t require total buy-in to be dangerous. People may not buy every specific detail of the plot. But theories offer a projection of what they’ve already come to suspect. That plausibility produces/sustains a sort of fear & paranoia.

The danger with conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” is that people don’t have to buy every last detail.

They just need to share in the paranoia which fuels it. And it comes to them via the media they consume, produced in the paranoid style. This is the invitation to churches, because paranoia, hysteria, these traits are not characteristic of resurrection people.

And yet Christians are just as—if not more so—susceptible. Which is why it’s so difficult to hear “that’s too political” as a response from churches.

The Confessing Church in Germany wasn’t organized against Nazism. It was organized around the Cross.

This distinction is lost on culture war evangelicalism today in the US.

The partisan platform has extended the Lord’s table as the new rite of continuation in many churches. This brand of evangelicalism casts itself in the mold of Bonhoeffer

But it functionally exists to resist today’s American Left, just like it says Bonhoeffer resisted Nazism

But it has tossed the Confessing Church’s lesson: the church is defined theologically, not politically.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote many of his letters from a Nazi prison cell to his good friend, Eberhard Bethge.

Decades later, Bethge visited Jerry Falwell's church in America.

This is what he said after Bethge was handed a "Jesus First!" lapel and an American flag lapel: 🧵 "I couldn't help but think of myself in Germany in 1933. That was exactly what we believed... on the one hand, our nation’s proud renewal, to which we wanted to devote our energy and time and to make sacrifices if need be; on the other hand, to Jesus Christ at the same time.

How retrieving the faithfulness of German Christians can help the church understand our responsibility right now 👇

jaredstacy.com/2022/03/02/the… Since Christians cannot predict the  particular path history will take, the Church must not betray its nature by confusing the authority of its proclamation with an ability to offer geo-political insight or analysis into “what needs to happen next”

1/ Why do some white American evangelicals default to tyranny when it comes to masks, and not responsibility to our neighbor?

Why, in these churches, is racism a spiritual issue only, not physical & systemic?

Both point to the Christianity we've inherited.

A thread 🧵 2/ Today, pockets of evangelicalism label health directives as tyrannical, racism as solely spiritual, reduce abortion to a political issue, and traffic in conspiracies.

Is it possible all these point to a common problem?

My dissertation is a reparative theological critique of US Evangelicalism.

I’m working with evangelical historiography and theological ethics.

Here’s a few things I’m learning: 🧵 1) There are many stories of US Evangelicalism. Not all stories are created equal. There is no one authoritative story. But all stories are significant—because all stories are theological.