Month: September 2020

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I entered seminary in 1983, three years after Professor Pagels published her research. I encountered her Gnostic Gospels first at American Baptist Seminary of the West, where I was taking New Testament from William Herzog, and then again at Church Divinity School of the Pacific where I was taking a course on Patristics from Professor Lyman. I cannot recall the book making a big impression on me. In 1990 I left for the European History department at the University of Chicago and never looked back.

When a few weeks back a priest from our parish, Father Michael Hiller, put Professor Elaine Pagels together in my mind with Professor Heinz Pagels, I realized that I had to read the Gnostic Gospels again.

I loved it. And I realized how much I had absorbed without know it. Those who know me also know that I have a visceral response to apophatic knowledge of the divine. It really makes me nauseous. Not among Buddhists or Hindu or Jews, but specifically among Christians. Because, for me, the mystery is revealed. It is the Cross. That’s the whole point. Its absolute foolishness. God has adopted, had always adopted, from the beginning and before the beginning had adopted — the body. A disembodied encounter with God is an oxymoron. It may be many good things. But it is definitely not Christian.

But . . .

The body is a social and cultural and historical artifact. It does not bear its meaning on its surface. And that’s what makes Professor Pagels’ research so terribly interesting. Because, with most of you, I ALSO bristle at the pseudo-Pauline defenses of slavery, misogyny, patriarchy, and empire — all of the surface forms that Gnostics resisted and the orthodox lustily embraced. Bodies are socially and historically specific. The body embraced by the Roman Catholics was male and hierarchical. The astral body embraced by the Gnostics was often gender fluid and egalitarian.

Which means that, like most of you, I have cast myself in the delightful role of a rabbi who, happily, must interpret texts. (Incidentally, don’t bewail this role. Don’t rue it. Here are these texts. Midrash. Midrash. Midrash.)

My own center of gravity is First Corinthians, chapters 1 and 2. (Go read them.) There is a mystery here. The Gnostics are right. But it is a mystery different from the one they teach, even though the boundaries between Paul’s communities and the Gnostic communities in 64 CE were highly fluid. For Paul and his communities the mystery was that God, real God, not second or third-tier God, would become flesh. No. The real mystery, for Paul, was that the real God, the highest God, the Creator — no, before the Creator — the Absolute — would die. There. Not metaphorically. Not mystically. Really die. God. The end. That is the foolishness of the cross.

Well. That would explain why the Crucified God has attracted every miscreant across the empire.

Now. Obviously. This is terrible news for James and Peter. And this terrible news is littered across Paul’s authentic letters. OMG.

After a two-month hiatus, I am back considering Paul Krugman and Robin Wells standard economic text and how Marx lines up with neoclassical economics. My argument is that Marx adds nothing, or nearly nothing to neoclassical economics, of which he was among the earliest authors. What he adds, and what nearly every department of economics lacks, is a social and historical framework within which to grasp the validity of their framework and models. This means that most economics departments, including the University of California, Berkeley, where I taught for six years, cannot grasp the social and historical validity of their own models. This is both unfortunate and unnecessary.

Chapter 7 in Krugman and Wells is a no-brainer. It deals with taxes. This is one of the subjects that economists have grasped intuitively since the 18th century. There is absolutely no mystery that, for the individual who is taxed, on the goods for which she is taxed, taxes shift the choices that individual makes, the value she enjoys, and the goods she produces, the volume and the price she charges for these goods.

Marx disagrees with none of these observations. Communities smaller than fifty individuals, in which direct communications and direct assessments are sufficient, need not worry about taxes. Larger than fifty, stories are required to convey the need the community suffers and therefore the demand they make on others. This is simply true. In communities larger than fifty, an assessment story needs to be told and needs to be believed.

The story might be a very simple one. You pay me, or I kill you.

But, more often, it is a story about the gods, or virtue, or the temples, or the poor. The story might be very elaborate, or it may be very simple.

Nevertheless, everyone — everyone — understands that taxes draw upon an individual’s marginal product.

They might also understand that taxes contribute to everyone’s marginal benefit: fewer criminals, fewer vagrants, more beautiful gardens, cleaner water, more secure walls, stronger ramparts, better equipped soldiers. And so on.

The contribution that Marx makes to this discussion is marginal. And, for us, it is relatively non-controversial. Taxes generally reproduce the dominant social formation. They reproduce the conditions that benefit capital accumulation for the communities that have created the taxing authority.

Marx was not so dense as to feel that this always or inevitably led capitalists to oppose taxes. Taxes might actually benefit capitalists, either because those who are taxed are those at the bottom of the income hierarchy, as in Great Britain or the US today, or because the taxing authority invests the taxes in ways that benefit those who are taxed, as in Germany, where taxes finance education, health, and welfare and create an employment pool of superior workers and generate a data base that benefit all investors. All of this fits unproblematically within Marx’s mature social theory.

But Marx was not satisfied with these surface forms of appearance. He was more interested in the dependence of this framework upon labor. Sharing, after all, is a good thing. And taxes sound an awful lot like sharing. But, so long as taxes are drawn upon the marginal product, they are drawn upon MPL, the marginal product of labor. That is, they are drawn upon ΔQ/ΔL, where the efficiency of labor (or capital) invokes a line whose destination is never reached. Taxes are drawn upon the efficiency of labor (or capital) whose goal is never, ever, reached. How much more efficient can labor become? How much more efficient capital? The point is, should this line ever flatten or, God forbid, begin to rise, then the marginal value from which taxes could be drawn is relatively less. And this means that our goal is, by definition, Sisyphean.

Marx is not opposed to taxes. Nor is a he fan. He simply wants to point out that taxes are not the solution. Indeed, given that taxes have been around forever, they are not really the problem either. The problem is that taxes are drawn upon a social form that cannot by definition be satisfied. They feed back into a social form whose aim is not satisfaction.

Taxes might be leveraged instead to reduce the role that labor plays in the marginal product. Taxes might be leveraged to reduce this role to zero. What then? In that case, we might decide how we want our extraordinary wealth to be used by us all, together. How would that work? You know, like democracy. Like res publica, the wealth we hold in common. What?

It is impossible to read Jewish and Christian biblical literature without bumping into not simply the messianic, but the apocalyptic. And whereas biblical writers are unequivocal in their hope to see the dawn of the messianic age, they are at best ambivalent over the age of the apocalypse, even where, as is often the case, the two are closely linked. I am reminded in this respect of both Walter Benjamin and Rosa Luxemburg, and, to a lesser extent, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who saw in their times — the civil wars of the 1920s, fascism in the 1920s and 1930s — not only “disaster triumphant,” but also “divine violence” (Benjamin) and “opportunity” (Luxemburg). There is, in any case, plenty of precedent on the left for seeing in one’s times the two sides of messianism: emancipation and terror, the dawn of God’s community and the apocalypse.

This two-fold, ambivalent, character of the apocalypse has gotten me thinking about the white nationalist, anti-Semitic, Christian Right, which is simultaneously eager to see a radical form of Zionism prevail in Israel and has embraced language about “world Jewry” that is straight from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

There is a well-known critique of Jewish Zionism in Israel and the United States, which I do not wish to address here. Instead, although the two are related, I want to limit my thoughts to white nationalist, anti-Semitic, Christian Zionism, of the sort pushed by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump advisor Stephen Miller. And I want to focus even more narrowly less upon Kushner’s and Miller’s no doubt perverse and twisted reasons for supporting Israel than on white nationalist evangelical Christians, most of whom believe that we are living in the end times, on the eve of Armageddon, the seven year tribulation, and the millennial rule of Christ.

Socially and historically, millennialism appears during times of crisis. This is entirely understandable. Indeed, this is also the case in biblical literature. No matter how many times the gospel writers flag this error — “no one knows the day or hour” (Matthew 24:36) — the Apocalypse of Saint John appears designed to fan the apocalyptic flames; never mind that this text was written almost two millennia ago; never mind that millions of Christians, entirely disregarding Matthew’s warning, have believed themselves to be living during the end times.

It was therefore entirely predictable not only that St John would contribute to the flames, following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, but also that Benjamin, Luxemburg, Adorno, and Horkheimer would make their own contributions in the shadow of fascist terror. These are dark times.

Clearly, however, Hal Lindsey is no Walter Benjamin, Tim LaHaye is no Max Horkheimer. So, aside from the obvious, where do white nationalist, anti-Semitic Christian Zionists differ from their no less hopeful, but also profoundly more critical counterparts?

First, take the reestablishment of Israel as a quasi-monarchical Jewish theocracy. Nothing in science or history or even, truth be told, biblical literature suggests anything even remotely similar to authoritarian Likud domination as somehow “emancipatory,” least of all for Jews. And, yet, in the perverse and twisted minds of white nationalist and Zionist Christians, since the Messiah will return to a restored Temple to rule over a restored Theocratic Kingdom, clearly the secular and overwhelmingly socialist first wave of Zionists in the 1940s and 1950s proved woefully inadequate. Only the militarist, authoritarian, triumphalist Likud party fits the violent image of the Davidic Kingdom formed by white nationalist anti-Semitic Christian Zionists.

Second, white nationalist anti-Semitic Christian Zionists all know how this story ends — not with Likud in charge, but with an equally militaristic and hate-mongering Messiah rapturing all but 10,000 witnesses who serve as God’s protected witnesses through the time of the Great (seven-year) Tribulation at the end of which, Jesus Christ (not Benjamin Netanyahu) will return at the head of a huge army to defeat everyone who is not a born-again believer: yes, including all of the Jews. (Obviously, since no good Jew believes this cock-and-bull story, Likud and its far right accomplices are only all too happy to let white nationalist anti-Semitic Christian Zionists drum up support for Israel in Congress without the least fear that Jesus actually will return and defeat the Jews in a final battle.)

But, third, even though times of social, economic, and political turmoil lend themselves to both apocalyptic fears and messianic hopes, it obviously makes a huge difference how we understand “what comes next.” This could appear to be a simple matter of biblical exegesis. But it is not. Here it must be recognized that Zionism itself is a product of nineteenth century ethno-religious nationalism, not altogether different in form from the multiple ethno-religious nationalisms that sprouted all across Europe following the Napoleonic wars. Each language and race its own nation. Right? Each race its own “natural” religion. Right? Here we might simply recall that the author of one of the most influential pseudo-sociological studies at the turn of the nineteenth century, Max Nordau, author of Entartung (Degeneration), was also a fierce Zionist. Contrast this view with Theodor Adorno’s:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects — this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.

T Adorno, Minima Moralia, “Finale.”

For Adorno, writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, the question is not who to exclude, who to defeat, who to battle, or who will rule. For Adorno, the question is the light the messiah sheds on how we think about our world “without velleity or violence.”

It is therefore not a matter of biblical interpretation. Not a matter of exegesis. There are, after all, reams of Davidic texts that celebrate and anticipate the warrior Messiah. At the same time, it is also an established, indisputable, fact that Messianism retreats — and retreats quite dramatically — wherever individuals are well cared for, well educated, well protected, healthy, secure, and loved. Indeed, I would even surmise that one of the underlying reasons white nationalist leaders hate social democracy is that their violent Messianic outlook depends upon a violated and damaged clientele who need desperately to be saved.

From this vantage-point it is clear that while Zionism — the establishment of Theocratic Israel — is the means — the destruction of world Jewry in the final battle is the ultimate goal. But this means that white nationalist Christian Zionist anti-Semitism needs to be understood within the context of the growing fascist movement not simply in the US, but throughout South America and Europe.

I am inspired to return to debt by the gospel reading for today’s proper, Proper 19A, Matthew 18:21-35:

Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times. For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

First, yes, there is something about debt forgiveness in there somewhere, along with a not negligible bit of social stratification — the slave-master relationship — and outright cruelty. He handed him over to be tortured? “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you”? Really?

But I am also inspired to return to debt because barely a day goes by without my being accosted by views on debt, often from the pens of economists who ought to know better (e.g., the late David Graeber), that do less to clarify than to obscure the nature of debt under capitalism.

This is largely the fault of left-leaning scholars, some of whom regrettably are Marxian, who have never fully come to terms with the truly revolutionary character of the capitalist social formation. In their view, the essence of debt remains today, as it was prior to the emergence of capitalism, a form of stealing; which, without question, is precisely what it was prior to the emergence of capitalism.

In the capitalist formation, debt rests upon the multiple temporal horizons on which value operates. These multiple horizons were but poorly understood in the era of classical economic thinking, from roughly 1776-1860. The first substantive breakthrough came with Jean-Baptiste Say, who was able to develop a mathematically rigorous model for showing how the values of all goods in any market both shaped, and in turn were shaped by, the values of all other goods. The next substantive breakthrough came with William Stanley Jevons, who was able to show that the values of identical goods in different places and the same good at different times, including the monetary good, could and often did differ substantially. Jevons also showed that the same monetary instrument at the same instant could be credited with different values depending on its own differing possible temporal horizons, i.e., the future value of the assets in which it could be or would be invested.

In this context debt arises from an investor’s calculation that the present value of the monetary good in her possession will have marginally greater value at some specified future date, when a loan is due, than it enjoys in the present; whereas the debtor calculates that her debt in the present will be marginally lower on some specified future date, when her debt is due, than it bears in the present. If we consider all of the multiple debt schedules that every business of any considerable size is juggling simultaneously, never mind any reasonably well-endowed household, it is clear that both lenders and debtors are unceasingly calculating future values with dates of maturity and anticipated values that differ wildly from one another. This is not a defect, as Marx noted, but a feature. The monetary instrument does not measure value in a snapshot, but in a three-dimensional, constantly shifting, montage.

This also, of course, holds for the labor commodity. Yes. Labor is the source of all value. And, yes. The labor commodity is unique insofar as, unlike other commodities, it wants to live and can only do so if it submits to the marginal value of its good, its own labor. (We assume, for the time being, the “Ava,” the lead in Hollywood’s Ex Machina, is a fiction and that machines and intellectual property are not subject to the same compulsion to desire life.) To the multiple product lines of human beings, therefore, there are also multiple schedules based, among other things, on the marginal values of the products investors anticipate winning from their employment. Note, as well, that for Marx, as for other economic thinkers after 1860, the value of the labor commodity is calibrated and recalibrated moment by moment not only in relation to the aggregate values of all human labor product lines, but all commodities in aggregate, such that the values enjoyed by the labor commodity may fluctuate wildly even when the immediate conditions of production (factor costs) remain relatively constant.

Debt under capitalism rests upon a calculation that the macroeconomic ratio ΔQ/ΔL, the marginal product of labor (MPL), will continue to grow; a calculation that the numerator, the change in quantity, will continue to outpace the change in labor required to produce that change in quantity; and, therefore, that tomorrow’s dollar will continue to be worth more than today’s dollar; and, therefore, that investing that dollar today will generate greater value than that dollar spent today. But what if that does not hold true? What if tomorrow’s dollar is worth less? What if ΔQ, the change in quantity, is not keeping up with ΔL, the change in the labor required to produce that change in quantity? In that case, the future values of today’s goods will be less than their present values. And, as an investor, in that case, it would be foolish for me to lend capital today to make less value tomorrow and it would be foolish for me to borrow capital today to realize less value tomorrow.

As Lord Keynes showed almost a century ago, it is impossible to compel investors to invest money today to make less money tomorrow. This is the definition of bad debt.

But let us look at this debt from the vantage point of the only commodity, the human commodity, eager to maintain its life. Viewed from the vantage point of capital, investing even in this commodity beyond its marginal value would be foolish. To illustrate this point, we can think of three workers. For the first, the reserve wage, the wage below which she will refuse employment, is $200/hour; for the second, the reserve wage is $100/hour; for the third, it is $50/hour. But let us suppose that even at $1/hour an investor anticipates realizing less than $1 in future value. That is to say, what if there is no wage at which an investor anticipates realizing a return? In that case, the value of the labor commodity is zero. In fact, it is less than zero. In order to preserve whatever value investors still enjoy, in that case, they must neither a lender nor a borrower be.

Lord Keynes penned an interesting section in his General Theory in which he contemplates a regulatory solution to this problem:

If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism. For a little reflection will show what enormous social changes would result from a gradual disappearance of a rate of return on accumulated wealth. A man would still be free to accumulate his earned income with a view to spending it at a later date. But his accumulation would not grow. He would simply be in the position of Pope’s father, who, when he retired from business, carried a chest of guineas with him to his villa at Twickenham and met his household expenses from it as required. Though the rentier would disappear, there would still be room, nevertheless, for enterprise and skill in the estimation of prospective yields about which opinions could differ. For the above relates primarily to the pure rate of interest apart from any allowance for risk and the like, and not to the gross yield of assets including the return in respect of risk. Thus unless the pure rate of interest were to be held at a negative figure, there would still be a positive yield to skilled investment in individual assets having a doubtful prospective yield.

JM Keynes, General Theory, Chapter 16.

Notice. Lord Keynes is not suggesting that investors cannot win returns on all investments. They simply cannot win returns on money. They have to invest in stuff. Moreover, they can leave things to their heirs and assigns. But they cannot leave capital goods. The paragraph could well have been written by Thomas Piketty and Immanuel Saez. What the paragraph does not say, and cannot say, is that investors are forbidden from investing in other’s ventures, investments that presumably will mature and yield returns greater than the original investment. In other words, we have not really escaped from the lender-debtor framework with its multiple, differential, temporal horizons.

A second attempt by capitalism to leap over its shadow was proposed by Friedrich von Hayek, who, in 1932, over the signatures of this LSE colleagues, engaged in a highly acrimonious debate with Lord Keynes and his oxbridge colleagues on the pages of the Times of London. Following his mentor, Carl Menger, von Hayek held to a “realist” view of the monetary instrument. Borrowing from the future to pay for the present (i.e., printing money and lowering interest rates) was illegitimate, claimed von Hayek, because it cheated creditors of the real value of their assets in the present). Lord Keynes demurred. First, just as they had for the Great War, so in the Great Depression, public emergency took precedence over the wealth of the rentier; but, second, just as investors in the Great War actually realized the value of their capital, and then some, so they might anticipate healthy returns in from their investment in the present. Lord Keynes and his oxbridge colleagues proposed not monetary realism, but monetary relativism.

Ironically, at the time of this acrimonious exchange, von Hayek was dissertation advisor at LSE to a certain Oscar Lange, the same Oscar Lange who during the war was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and who, following World War II, took his dissertation advisor’s monetary realism all they way to Poland. From there monetary realism spread throughout the Comintern as the only acceptable doctrine in truly socialist economies.

On this view, debt was a capitalist invention, a means to steal, not from the rentier, as von Hayek thought, but from the state — and, therefore, by inference, from the workers who were identical to the state. The only challenge was to identify and confer upon all things, including the monetary instrument, their true value.

Perhaps even more ironically, this Austrian School “realist” view of money and debt became a non-negotiable pillar among Eastern European and Soviet economic thinkers, including, not surprisingly, Karl Polanyi, notwithstanding the many points of contention between Polanyi and von Hayek.

So, where did these economic thinkers get it wrong? They got it wrong, let me suggest, right out of the block. Capitalist debt differs fundamentally from debt prior to the emergence of capitalism. That is because capitalist debt, although it expresses itself in the monetary commodity, is in fact grounded in the social valuation of the labor commodity. When in the fourteenth century masters began to measure the value of their workers in equal units of abstract time, the abstract form of value generated in this calculation took on the appearance of a transcendental social form valid for all commodities, no matter their kind. The value of labor was no longer counted a specific practice, e.g., carpentry, that produced a specific good, e.g., furniture. Instead, the practice, carpentry, was translated into a duration of time having value. And the furniture was translated into the value of that time. Translated into value, labor becomes infinitely transportable not only spatially, but temporally. Its value produces a future value that is greater or smaller than its current value. This quasi-independent value, once it has acquired general social validity, appears to be dictated by society in general. Oscar Lange can object that debt is stealing from workers. Friedrich von Hayek can object that debt is stealing from investors. But, as Marx repeatedly noted, the thief here is not the capitalist. The thief is the value form of the commodity or, more specifically, capitalism.

Back to Matthew’s gospel. Why was Jesus so preoccupied with debt forgiveness. Why would his Father even go as far as torturing creditors who failed to forgive debt? What exactly is at stake here?

Let us suppose for the moment that the only debt we should owe anyone is love (Romans 13:8). And let us suppose that debt forgiveness is the essence of divine emancipation. Finally, let us suppose then that we are all debtors and that in the divine economy we all owe this debt. But then let us suppose that this debt was paid. What, the debt to love one another? No. The debt paid was the debt accumulated for our failure to love one another. What exactly is at stake here? Do you claim to be a Christian? Do you claim to be a Christian nation? Is your debt forgiven? So, how are you going to respond to individuals and nations indebted to you?

According to Wikipedia, Occam’s razor is “the problem-solving principle that ‘entities should not be multiplied without necessity.^’[1][2] The idea is attributed to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), a scholastic philosopher and theologianwho used a preference for simplicity to defend the idea of divine miracles.”

I have been thinking about Ockham lately on two registers. One is the extravagant, ebullient, proliferation of dogmas required of and by right wing Christian nationalists as “biblical” or “Christian.” The other register involves the things we can say that, while most likely true and reliable, are not theologically required.

Take abortion. Neither pro- nor anti-choice, pro-life and anti-life, are biblical teachings per se. They are not “Christian.” This is not to say that Christians cannot build an argument on one side or the other. But Occam’s razor challenges us: why bother? Is it really necessary to the definition or identity of “Christian,” even “biblical Christian”? Not really.

But now take something like gun control. With all of the killing, violence, some of it quite grizzly and questionable, positively endorsed in biblical texts, there might seem to be no question but that Christians must be pro-violence, grizzly violence — dash the babies on the rocks violence. And, yet, most of us would say: well, no, there are really good, non-theological, non-required, reasons why we should control who owns and how owners use what kinds of guns. Gun control, required by the Bible? Probably not. A good thing? Probably.

One of the tell-tail signs of hypostasy is that it claims divine authority for convictions that are not clearly divine and denies recognition for human convictions that are not prohibited.

This is kind of a definition of white Christian nationalism, of Trump’s unique variety of fascism, which is not the same as German, Italian, or Spanish fascism, but is without question fascist. It claims divine authority for convictions — such as pro-life or gun ownership or police killings of black men — that are clearly not divine and it denies recognition for human convictions — the social franchise, public care for all, respect for all people — that are not prohibited by the Bible.

Occam’s razor. Think about it.