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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

Time in minutes after which christian nationalists will form a circular firing squad once they've cemented their grip on the US government: 2

The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.

The colony of Maryland was originally intended to be a safe place for Catholics, and the first chance the Puritans got, they revolted, invaded, burned the Catholic churches down and persecuted their worshippers. The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics.

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And it isn't an old attitude. I remember documentaries stating that John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Catholicism was something that could have cost him his election.

https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2024/05/07/cbc-...

> The past which the 'make america great again' people want to take us back to absolutely loathed Catholics, something I don't think modern Catholics realize.

The past that MAGA refers to is imaginary. It's "the good old days", whatever that evokes in any individual, with however selective that individual's memory is or however incomplete that individual's knowledge of history is.

It's like the Brexit referendum - Britons voted on "the status quo is bad, would you like something better than the status quo?" and a slim majority of them voted yes. They didn't agree on exactly how things should be negotiated to be better, just that they could imagine something better than the current state.

"The colony... The US was explicitly not founded on religious tolerance, it was founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"

Seems a bit broken to claim that something that happened in 1689 when it was a colony, as you explicitly note, is fundamental to the founding of the nation a century later.

Yeah, there’s also a particularly American version of Catholicism that hates the Church and its teachings, who include among their adherents the Vice President and at least one Supreme Court Justice if not several. While one would hope they would learn the lessons of history, the particular details of the theocracy they envision probably won’t break down along the same lines as past conflicts.

It is not a broken claim, it is a well documented fact.

“The deepest bias in the history of the American people,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. “The most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history,” said John Higham.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/12/america-histor...

That many Protestants discriminated against Catholics != "founded on freedom to persecute Catholics"

I say this as an American Catholic who went to Catholic schools until college and knows full well about Catholic discrimination in US history. Protestants have discriminated against other protestants, everyone has discriminated against LDS, LDS has discriminated against everyone else, everyone has discriminated against Jews, Catholics have discriminated against <insert your choice of target here>, etc. These facts don't make up founding motives just because they are true.

Yes, the stupidity and shortsightedness of American Catholic integralists like Vermuele is stunning to me. If America does ever become a Christian theocracy, it's going to be a Protestant theocracy. It wouldn't be an altar-and-throne continental monarchy, it would be more like Cromwell's England, where "Papists" were considered enemies of the state. Do these guys not remember that Jack Chick wrote just as many comics villainizing Catholics as he did atheists? That's how evangelicals actually think, once any temporary alliances of convenience have accomplished their goals.

It’s going to be Evangelical. Some variety of megachurch prosperity teaching that faults the poor with some kind of republican ideology.

That’s why anyone that believes in separation of religion and state should tell these folks anytime they push for Christianity in schools, just tell them: ok but it needs to be the true Christianity- Jehovah Witnesses- then they will shut up. They hate Jehovah witnesses, then Mormons, then Catholics, …

It stuns me that Republican Mormons think that Evangelicals like them for anything but their political assistance. As soon as Evangelicals remove the non-Christians, their tent will get smaller, just like you're saying.

I have Mormon family that thinks that they're welcome in the Evangelical tent (they'll even visit the Ark Experience!), but Evangelicals hate Mormons just like they hate gays, liberals, trans people, atheists, etc. It's just that Mormons (for now) vote the way that Evangelicals want.

At this point, it's going to be some sort of post-Christian, culturally Christian social media influencer-driven, conspiracy theory-laden melange that incorporates everything from Tartarian giants to simulation hypothesis to Flat Earth. Q Gospel indeed.

Another member of the "Leopards eating people's face (but surely they won't be eating MY face)" party.

If?

I'm ex-catholic but not quite sure the "we want to be free to oppress catholics" narrative quite holds up in the case of the trump admin.

The current supreme court has 6 catholic justices, with 2 appointed by trump. 2 of them rubber stamp everything trump does (alito and thomas), and most of the others support him more often than not (rogers, coney-barrett, kavanaugh). Only sotomayor opposes him frequently.

If you covertly (or not) want to oppress a religion why stack the highest court in the country with people from said religion?

I think the point is that it's a (temporary) coalition of the factions that joined together in order to get a leader elected, a leader which is in fact not religious at all and can not be considered to be a member of any of the factions. That temporary coalition will fall apart once faction members are given power in various domains, and then can enact their own faction's preferences, which involve harming other factions.

I know the "flooding the zone with shit" strategy of MAGA/GOP strategists works somewhat at burying relevant information, but improve your searching skills a bit and this is just one example of what you'll find:

Pentagon To Host Good Friday Service Just For Protestants, Not Catholics

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/news-live-updates_n_69ca6616e...

That's easy, the circular firing squad points outward until you've shot everyone else.

I think that assuming religion is relevant is wrong. Their moral bankruptcy was what got them their jobs, their religion is secondary and irrelevant.

Because they figure those two will flip to their side if forced to make a choice. Note for example that Pete Hegseth made an explicit choice to exclude Catholic worship from the Pentagon chapel this past Good Friday.

It’s worth noting that while Catholics who ally themselves with evangelical protestants try to persuade themselves otherwise, many (most?) evangelical protestants view Catholics as not-actually-Christian pagans who need to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior to avoid the actual flames of hell. It’s a phenomenon not unlike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...

Trump doesn't care if somebody is a Catholic. Many of the people around Trump do.

Perhaps somehow related to founding protestants fleeing catholic persecution. It’s the sort of thing that will leave the world blind.

The Puritans, what we generally mean when we say 'founding protestants,' weren't fleeing persecution from Catholics.

In fact, they weren't fleeing persecution at all! They were living in the (relatively) religiously tolerant Netherlands. They left the Netherlands because they weren't succeeding in business there. They came to North America essentially as economic migrants.

I think the Pilgrims lived in the Netherlands for about 10 years, in a refugee town run by Catholics. But they were a minority on the Mayflower. I don’t think any spoke Dutch.

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