Biden, Commander of the "True Believers"
by Thierry Meyssan
Wednesday 17th of February 2021
As the United States resolutely moves towards civil war, President Joe Biden leans on left-wing believers, from different faiths. He sees Donald Trump's voters as people who have been abused in their faith and whom he must bring back to the true path. By dint of manipulating religions, the Democratic Party is dividing the country, not between distinct denominations, but between ways of conceiving the faith. President Biden aims to unite all his fellow citizens under his own authority to pursue the path laid out by Barack Obama. In fact, far from appeasing, despite himself he radicalized the political debate.
Ihave previously presented the proponents of the “ woke ” culture in the US as “Godless Puritans”. This is a shorthand pointing out that many of them do not believe in God. I would like to correct this portrait by dealing here with the imprint of believers within the American left. It is a subject very little approached in the USA [ 1 ] and totally ignored in Europe where we always erase the outrageous aspects of religions in the US overlord.
First, it is appropriate to set the context:
- The United States would have been founded by a Puritan sect, the Pilgrim Fathers, who came in the 17th century aboard the Mayflower . They left England, crossed the Atlantic, found an almost empty continent where they brought their demand for purity and built a "City on the Hill" that lights up the world. Indeed today, the United States is the champion of religious freedom in the world, but not of freedom of conscience : the testimony of a renegade against his former church or sect is not admissible in court.
- During the Cold War, President Eisenhower positioned the United States as the champion of the Faith in the face of the “Godless Communism” of the Soviets [ 2 ]. He distributed “Christian” propaganda books to all his soldiers and set up an ecumenical prayer group in the Pentagon, now known as “The Family” [ 3 ]. He spread it throughout the western world. All the chairmen of the Committee of Chiefs of Staff have been and still do, as well as many foreign heads of state or government.
- Finally, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Americans have become detached from their Churches and 17% of them claim to be agnostics, and sometimes even atheists. As for the number of believers who do not claim to be affiliated with a particular Church, it continues to increase. Political discourse is no longer addressed only to believers of all Christian denominations, nor even to believers of all religions, but also to non-believers.
This development was first expressed at the Democratic Party Convention in 2012. While many workshops were organized by religious groups, the texts presented and adopted no longer mentioned God. Not that the party is no longer composed of an overwhelming majority of believers, but because they intended to continue to address everyone and that the US people had changed.
In the 2004 presidential election, Democratic candidate John Kerry was a Catholic who had hesitated to become a priest. He believes he can count on the electorate of his religious community, but does not succeed. The Catholics of the left are not yet organized. His speech on abortion shocks the future Cardinal Burke who asks the episcopal conference to refuse him the Eucharist. Finally, Pope Benedict XVI will evoke, after his defeat to George W. Bush, his de facto excommunication .
In 2008, the election of Democrat Barack Obama, which was touted as a victory for black organizations, was actually an even greater victory for left-wing, mostly white Christians. His chief of staff, John Podesta, being a Catholic activist had gathered all the chapels of left-wing Christians, Protestants and Catholics, to support his accession to the White House
Similarly, the passage of the law on the obligation for workers to take out health insurance from a private company is above all a victory for Christians on the left against those on the right. The first intended to follow the precepts of their religion whose values the second wanted to save . Note that Jesus the Nazarene always refused to position himself on these grounds, but taught by his example . Note also that Barack Obama's legislative choice was not political. He never cared about what his fellow citizens wanted.
Barack Obama has a great religious culture, not only Christian, but also Muslim. Not much is known about his faith, but he always appeared to be very respectful of all forms of religion. This has long allowed him to appear as a wise man and to unite believers from all walks of life behind his name.
He reformed the White House Office for Faith-Based Initiatives created by his predecessor. He made sure that federal grants would not be used in favor of any particular cult. He placed the young Joshua DuBois there to coordinate the believers on the left and added to him a council composed of their principal figures:
- the Reverend Traci Blackmon committed to health care for all;
- Reverend Jennifer Butler, Founder of Faith in Public Life;
- Reverend Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and spiritual advisor to the president;
- Pastor Michael McBride committed to guns and police violence against blacks;
- bestselling writer Rachel Held Evans, author ofA year of biblical femininity: how a liberated woman found herself sitting on her roof, covering her head and calling her husband master ;
- Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. He was also appointed United States Ambassador for World Religious Freedom;
- Harry Knox, leader of the Human Rights Campaign's Religion and Faith Program then director of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, leader of gay rights and the fight for the right to abortion;
- Rami Nashashibi, director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. He campaigned to distinguish Muslims from terrorists after the 9/11 attacks.
All these personalities took an active part last year in the debates on the statues to be debunked or in the demonstrations of Black Lives Matter.
During her presidential campaign Hillary Clinton spoke as little as possible about her personal faith. She spoke a lot to believers, especially evangelicals. With a speech on the precepts of Christianity which would require confessing the original sin of slavery and receiving all migrants, she failed to convince them. It was only after her electoral failure that she announced that she was considering becoming a Methodist pastor.
On the contrary, his rival, Donald Trump, who does not seem to have any religious concerns, has managed to rally to him the majority of right-wing Christians and particularly white evangelicals. He presented himself to them not as a believer, but as a "guy who was going to do the job" and save the values that left Christians neglected. Right-wing Christians appreciated his sincerity and saw him as a disbeliever sent by God to save America.
During Obama's tenure, left-wing believers in the United States had the impression — rightly or wrongly — that Pope Francis was speaking to them in particular. Indeed, they interpreted his first apostolic letter, Evangelii gaudium (2013), which invites the faithful to evangelize the world, as a justification for their political commitment insofar as he addresses “the preferential option for the poor”. However, contrary to what left believers in the United States think, the Catholic Church has never taught to prefer certain men to others. Especially left believers received the encyclical Laudato si '(2015), devoted to environmental issues, as a support for their environmental activism. Overall, all faiths combined, they now consider Pope Francis to be the most legitimate religious leader.
Joe Biden is the second President of the United States to be Catholic after John Kennedy. But while Kennedy had to prove that he was independent and would not accept an injunction from a foreign pope, Biden was trying by all means to be dubbed by a pope adored by his constituents. During his election campaign, he released an advertising clip in which he explains what he owes to his faith. When he lost his wife and daughter in an accident, then one of his sons to cancer, it allowed him to overcome his grief and keep hope.
At the beginning of this article, I was referring to the Pentagon prayer group. Since its creation by General Eisenhower, it has organized a prayer lunch each year in early February with the current President of the United States. Everyone was waiting for President Biden's speech. It lasted 4 minutes by video conference. The speaker condemned "political extremism" (allusion to his predecessor) and celebrated brotherhood between "Americans".
For the new president, Americans are "good", as he proclaimed during the inauguration ceremony. The Democratic Party seeks Social Justice in the tradition of the “ Social Gospel ” of the 1920s. All Americans spontaneously should have followed it. Sadly, right-wing believers have been blinded by Donald Trump; a man without religion. They voted for this billionaire without realizing that they were betraying their faith. This is why it is his duty to open their eyes and make them happy in spite of themselves.
President Biden has never attempted to understand why right-wing believers voted Trump. He has always regarded this fact as an intellectual anomaly. So today, he tries to assimilate the QAnon group to a delusional sect that imagines Satan all over Washington. In each of his statements, he strives to present the Trump presidency as a mistake, a sinister parenthesis with no future.
For left-wing believers, the only thing that matters are the decisions taken since January 20 in favor of immigrants, women, sexual minorities, and against the violation of the sacred spaces of Indian minorities.
We are witnessing a vast misconception. Leftist believers think they should impose their political convictions in the name of God, while the Democratic Party thinks it should not think politically, but seduce its constituents. The separation between Church and State still exists from an institutional point of view, but no longer in daily practice. The problem has shifted: it is no longer between religions, but between different conceptions of the Faith.
Saint Bernard, who preached the Second Crusade, recognized that “Hell is paved with good intentions”. This is exactly what is happening here: believers on the left behave like fanatics. They talk about national unity, but have started a witch hunt that McCarthy's was not a big deal over. They are laying off hundreds of Pentagon advisers; tried to dismiss an elected member of the House of Representatives because she questions the official version of the 9/11 attacks; or want to arrest all members of the QAnon movement. They do not pacify the United States after the capture of the Capitol, but plunge it into civil war.
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