By David Futrelle
Donald Trump has tweeted many horrifying things since becoming our Fake President, but none perhaps as horrifying as the … thing … he tweeted out early this morning as a Fourth of July greeting to his subjects: video of a Trump-branded ersatz national anthem sung by an (almost) all-white mega-church choir.
My fellow Americans, witness the musical and political atrocity that is the song “Make America Great Again.” (And see if you can spot the Asian woman amidst the sea of white performers.)
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/882186896285282304
If Trump could figure out how to make this the new national anthem he almost certainly would. I guess this is what we get for electing an authoritarian meglomaniac to the highest office in the land.
While this song “feels like a dystopian anthem or a piece of explicit propaganda,” the Daily Dot notes,
[i]t’s actually an entirely real song performed by First Baptist Church in Dallas Saturday night.
The song was performed as part of an introduction to Trump’s speech during its Celebrate Freedom Rally and was written by the church’s former minister of music Gary Moore.
I can’t help but think of this clip from North Korean state television.
Enjoy your 4th of July, fellow Americans, as best you can given the circumstances.
Calvin’s theology makes of God an evil being. It’s like Calvin painted himself into a corner where that was the only conclusion he could reach. I agree with you that many of the evils of the present-day church are rooted in Calvinism. The United States has deep Calvinist roots, thanks to the Puritans.
I think most Christians believe in salvation by faith, but that faith without works is dead (James 2:17-17). Over and over, Jesus tells the people that he healed, “Your faith has made you well,” so clearly faith is important. The Great Commandment in Matthew 22:37-40 shows the two go together: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
I’ll stop before I get a roll going.
Roger Waters’ a real musician, has opinions about Trump
They might as well be singing “I Am Donald”.
@Grumpy, @AsAboveSoBelow
Interesting insights. Along with Calvin, much of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, has made God out to be the most punitive, most insecure, most rage-filled father ever.
Well, you have to understand something about the Old Testament. The Torah purports itself to be a history of the world written down by Moses during the Exodus, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the Exodus ever happened, or that the Israelite people ever left Canaan until the Babylonian Exile. Current scholarship is that the Torah was written by exiled Jews in Babylon, and that the Exodus story is the story of what those Jews hoped would happen to them and their oppressors, personally, soon. “Pharaoh” is not named in the Exodus story because “Pharaoh” = Babylon, coded so that the Babylonian authorities wouldn’t harass and punish the authors of the stories.
Basically, Egypt serves the same purpose in the Torah that Babylon serves in the New Testament, writing about a modern oppressive threat in code so that hopefully the authorities won’t figure it out.
So, in that light, the Torah stories are the stories of a people whose god had let them be taken into captivity and carried away to a foreign land, wishing divine vengeance upon their oppressors.
Also of note is the fact that only the upper-class and nobility among the Jews were taken into exile, so there is also an element of “how could this have happened to US SPECIFICALLY since we are so rich and special” that can be read into the priestly code etc.