The Ugly History of Dual-Loyalty Charges Ilhan Omar recently deployed an accusation that’s been used against religious minorities for years.
Interesting article, showing how treating Muslims as non-loyal to a country is the same bullshit already done against Catholics, Jews and other religions in USA.
It's an issue with religion in general, any of the Abrahamic religions, by their nature, demand loyalty to the religion above all else, whether it's country or even family.
But I'm more concerned with the loyalty of evangelicals in this country than any other religious group, they are the group proving to be the most erosive to our democracy.
As with nearly everything the right says, every accusation is a confession.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: evangelicals are considered so nutty in my home country, that no one takes them seriously. They're not a threat. They're a joke. I'm baffled that they have so much influence in the U.S.
They're easily brushed off until they start becoming a major demographic or unite with other fascistic groups. It's like any religious group, they are harmless as a minority but when the ideology takes hold at a large scale it starts to become a problem.
The US has, unfortunately, been stuck with religious fundementalists since its inception. Not exclusively, but the element has always been here.
Over the last century our Republican party was quickly losing political relevance, so they switched their primary target demographic to southern religious groups and racists, building on those groups' sense of aggrievement that fewer and fewer people believed in their ideas. It was called The Southern Strategy and it explains a lot about what's happening in the US currently and how these fringe groups become mainstreamed.
The evangelicals in the US also concoted a kind of toxic mixture of capitalism and religion, they built massive mega churches that run like corporations, and they did so in areas where there wasn't a whole lot going on economically or culturally. They run almost like company towns where everyone in the surrounding community is part of the cult.
Take it as a lesson, it can happen wherever you might be however far fetched it seems, be assurred that fascism is a global effort and the fascist fringe groups in your country are taking notes whenever there's a fascist victory in some other country. They learn from eachother and will exploit whatever form of irrational fundementalism, latent racism or culture of tradition that exists in your country.
It's kind of weird, we have 12 parties in "Folketinget" (Danish Parlament), and it only requires 2% of votes to get in. But our only religious party "Christian Democrats" has not managed to get in for decades.
Religion has very little power in politics here, despite (or maybe because?) the biggest church by far, is the government controlled "Peoples church", that even has it's own minister in the government!
The widespread religious fanaticism in USA seems insane here.
There's enough of them to make a difference and they actually show up when it counts. I don't know how taxes on churches work in other countries but they're basically tax shelters in the US.