White Supremacy is their True Religion – Black Theatre Matters

When a Trump supporter drags a big picket cross across the Captol Mall as one did in the course of the “Save America” Rally, I can understand the need to clarify what we saw on January sixth as having been influenced by Christianity. Christian iconography was throughout on that day of the Capitol siege. It’s easy accountable a faith system since it doesn’t use empirical evidence to come back to a conclusion. Faith relies on evidence of things unseen. One has to imagine first before physical evidence might be revealed – if ever. But Trump followers continue to exist a gradual fact-free eating regimen. They imagine Trump’s claims that there was rampant election fraud singling out his race from the entire others that were conducted on November 3, 2020. The success of Republicans who performed higher than Trump on the exact same ballots was ignored. But faith wasn’t the motivating factor on that Wednesday in Washington. It wasn’t even the abundance of false evidence that he repeated each day to support his assertions and emboldened his followers. It was their willingness to disregard the entire overwhelming evidence on the contrary for the promise of more cruelty, more racist, and incompetent policies supported by the President of the United States.

Devotion to Christian beliefs was not what moved the white Evangelicals, Catholic or Protestant Christians who make up Trump’s most ardent followers. They would must ignore the key tenets of the religion, the Ten Commandments. A Christian would must refute all of its instruction on personal conduct to behave in the way we saw on display in Washington D.C. This indictment includes the politicians who perpetuated the lie that this election was stolen from Trump. You cannot lie, carry weapons, threaten to hold or murder someone, and align those actions with the adoption of Commandment #6, “Thou shall not kill,” or Commandment #9, “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” In fact, the very act of being a follower of Trump, his mendacity, bigotry, cruelty, and general amoral behavior is in direct opposition to the lifetime of an individual of religion. That calls for an excellent deal of self-delusion.

The real motivator is race. More specifically, racial resentment and its handmaiden, white nationalism. That is the true”religion” these Trump supporters worship. White people in fear of a Black planet where they will’t get away with all the pieces or have their way on every topic. They don’t need to share power. It’s called “white privilege” for a reason.

Wednesday, January 6, 2021, was a likelihood for all of America to see the America Black people have known since 1865. It pulled the curtain back o an America violently defending white supremacy. This is the go-to strategy each time a major group of white people believes their free will and unbridled influence on all the pieces is being constrained. That is why Reconstruction gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. It’s why Black soldiers getting back from World War I gave rise to race riots within the country. From the Red Summer of 1919 through the Race Massacre of Tulsa, OK, in 1921, incited a brand new wave of racial intimidation and terrorism. White people took up arms to destroy Black communities, kill Black men who had been armed and trained by the United States military, and support manipulation of the law to secure white dominance in every a part of life. Just because the response to the election of Barack Hussein Obama as our first Black president inspired the establishment of the Tea Party Movement, the Freedom Caucus, and the overtly racist Birther Movement. The regular rise of white grievance has been ignored within the last forty years. Trump couldn’t have been elected without it.

So it should come as no surprise that the siege on the U.S. Capitol was following the mounting anger on the failure to overturn Georgia’s ends in the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. Triggered almost on cue, the Trump “Save America” Rally became a riotous mob mere hours after the primary Black Democrat had been elected to the Senate from the South, with the potential for the opposite Georgia Senate seat flipping, all done by the record-breaking efforts of Black Georgians organizing and voting en masse. This turned Georgia – a formerly reliable Republican stronghold – right into a battleground state for the primary time since 1992.