Today's Must-Read: "Christian Nation"?

This story starts off as a report on abuse of power by an Air Force general, but does much deeper than that:

According to a press statement from MRFF founder and president Michael L. Weinstein, a former Air Force officer, on Teichert’s website he has “denigrated LGBT individuals, slammed American society at large, and, of course, delivered election voting mandate directives” urging that only certain categories of Christians should be elected to public office.

Military officers enjoy the same freedom of religion as everyone else in America, so Teichert’s religious faith is not an issue in itself. But military service entails special restrictions on how religion is expressed, particularly if that expression is deemed to undermine military effectiveness, a point that lies at the heart of the MRFF’s complaint.

This is just another ugly tentacle of the monster known as Dominionism.

This is all justified, it would seem, by the mythology of America’s supposedly pure Christian origins, which supports a multitude of false or distorted historical narratives. This is a subject long studied by Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Massachusetts.

“Teichert’s blog posts epitomizes a kind of historical revisionism that historian Frank Lambert calls creating a ‘usable past,’” Clarkson told Salon. “This is done by selecting tidbits from history and suggesting that they support contemporary conservative Christian political views and candidates, or more importantly an interpretation of the Constitution. This is how Christian nationalists create a history that they use to justify not only their favored politicians and issues du jour, but often the more profound vision of political dominion we call ‘Dominionism.’”

In its starkest forms, the ideology known as Dominionism is clearly anti-democratic and un-American. Laws passed by overwhelming majorities are invalid if they conflict with “God’s law” — separating the races, for example, which was long perceived as a biblical mandate in the pre-civil rights South. So for obvious reasons most American Dominionists of the 21st century shield or shade their beliefs, sometimes even from themselves. But their underlying logic is broadly influential, Frederickson argues[.]

This is the result of the Republicans' embrace of the Moral Majority and other "Christian" extremist groups over the past several generations. And as we know from past behavior, they won't quit -- they'll just keep coming back, chipping away at the foundations of American society.