'Toontime: Rolling Downhill

credit: Adam Zygus, Buffalo News

Yes, friends, the Donald is on a roll--in his own mind.  The tax cut is blatantly unfair regardless of what reactionary apologists say.  The Big Ears Monument is a long, long overdue recompense for the white man's destruction of Native American culture and territorial rights.  And the poor may always be with us, but we do not have to seek our own moral justification by starting another war.  Calvin was rejected by "social gospel" Protestantism; the Catholic Church has always been the succor of the poor and disposed even when other Christian churches were not.

It was capitalist tycoons, the same people who now support the Donald, who conflated capitalistic super-patriotism with Christianity in order to combat what they saw as the "virus of collectivism" embodied by Roosevelt's New Deal programs. H.W. Prentis, head of the National Association of Manufacturers said in speech at the time, "The only antidote is a revival of American patriotism and religious faith.”  This corruption of the Christian ethic was spread across the country by fundamentalist preachers like Congregationalist minister Rev. James W. Fifield Jr. who preached capitalism to one of the first mega-churches in the US.  His congregation numbered four thousand, and his "Spiritual Mobilization" program counted 17,000 participating ministers.  This organization to preach the gospel of wealth was of course funded by money from oil tycoons, General Motors, and other patrons from across the corporate world.  According to this perversion, government is the embodiment of evil, and regulation of business violates the Ten Commandments.  When the "Red Scare" created the demagogue McCarthy, it was simple for the preachers of the emerging "Gospel of Prosperity" to insert godless communism and heathen communists in the blank as the devil of the moment.  Fifield chose Norman Vincent Peale to replace him as leader of the movement in 1947.  Trump attended Peale's Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. Trump referred to Peale as one of the most inspirational speakers he has ever heard.

All of this was preface to what is now called the "religious right",  and to which the feckless robber baron occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue panders.  One of Trump's favorite stump lines is, "we worship God, not government."  As usual the line resonates with religious conservatives, but little do they know the real meaning of that line is, "we worship Capitalism, not Jesus Christ."  The itinerant preacher of Galilee would simply shake his head in total disbelief, and perhaps say as he did to Simon Peter, "Get behind me, Satan".