The Dominionist Ziklag

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ziklag-secret-christian-charity-2024-election

The Christian Right's fundraising and lobbying machine is a veritable labyrinth and this is by design. Money is effectively laundered and the smoke and mirrors make it all but impossible to tell where the money is coming from and where the power is located. There are certain names that always seem to appear - these are in some cases key agents or actors. Sometimes they are the powers, the 'movers and shakers', other times they are the action-arms of the powers - which are often very wealthy people or the people that manage the wealth. It's complicated.

Just when you think that all the groups have been written about - another is discovered and exposed. I think they're probably being generated at a pretty significant clip and then every few years like a CIA programme they fold in on themselves and morph into something else with a different name.

Many conservative Christians (political, theological, and otherwise) were outraged to discover that some Anti-Trump Evangelicals are working with the Left and with liberals from Silicon Valley. It is admittedly outrageous and yet this is almost irrelevant when weighed against the billions of dollars flowing in from the corporate world into the coffers of the political activists and 'ministries' that comprise the Christian Right. This is ignored or justified. This article unfolds one corner of this vast network.

Given the power and sway these people hold, it's odd that they see themselves as guerrilla fighters operating from the fringes - the reference to Ziklag and David's sojourn among the Philistines. But the embattled and threatened narrative is effective as it generates fear and anger - the tools of this movement.

Reading about Ziklag's connections and participants, it's just a list of the familiar political and 'ministry' players and yet as with all grand-scale programmes the more tools and options the better. Each mechanism has its own unique aspects and so depending on what money is being moved and for what reason they can choose Ziglag or something else - one of the myriad councils, action groups, think-tanks, funds, and the like.

The theological underpinnings are out in the open. This is a Dominionist project that seeks to place Christians and Christian institutions in control of society and culture. Given that half the the US population opposes them, they have in recent years abandoned even the pretense of Classical Liberalism and are increasingly resorting to authoritarian rhetoric and models. There's an army of scholars and hacks producing material to argue for this paradigm - producing revisionist history and to justify it on ideological grounds. And there are not a few theologians who are part of this providing of 'Biblical' cover. These elements help sell this to the people in Middle America, the Rustbelt, and the South - and in churches all across the land.

The strategy includes campaigns in churches - little videos to be watched at the beginning of a service, in-person speakers who give short talks, special meetings hosted by churches. Many of you will have already encountered this.

And then there are the lawyers - there are endless lawsuits to be filed, especially in courts and jurisdictions where a favourable ruling is to be found. The goal in many instances it to reach both the state and US supreme courts. The very judicial activism long decried by the movement is in fact one of its key tools and strategies. Deception is endemic to this movement. The only ethic is victory - the end justifies the means. This has long been the case, but over the past decade it has become its core ethic and guiding principal. It ceased to be Christian long ago and Ziglag and other such entities are playing an important role in the large-scale Evangelical apostasy we are witnessing in our day.

From a theological perspective the tax and non-profit tax exemption issue (raised in the article) is minor. It's a case of manipulated ethics and immorality but again this has become the hallmark of this movement. Are their political opponents evil and un-Christian? Without a doubt, but in order to combat evil they have resorted to the same and become evil themselves. And from the standpoint of the Church, the world's evil is one thing - the world's evil inside the Church is in fact a much more serious issue. But that's a crucial point that few seem willing or able to grasp at this time. And as the Christo-American idolatry becomes more deeply rooted, this false religion develops not only its own mythology and theology, but its own ethics as well.

The Right and especially the Bircher-types have long railed against the elite and yet Ziklag represents the Christian Right's elite - who also happen to be corporate and political elite and very powerful members of society. Contrary to the New Testament these people are mammon-slaves and worshippers. Mammon is key to their movement because it represents power.

In many ways as I navigate all of this I think about the battles that took place in the Early Church. Questions of theology often drove the debate, but politics and power played a big role in the background and then as today the theologians turned nasty and encouraged violence and other evil. It's nothing new. Likewise we see the Church aligned with power during the Middle Ages and while Evangelicals and other Protestants like to pay lip service to the persecuted sects of the time they always seem to miss the part that these groups promoted poverty - they rejected the Church of wealth wed to power. As I have long argued, the Evangelical Church is this culture's Roman Catholicism. In the United States the mark and center of catholicity is not Rome but Washington, America itself. This is the ecumenical driver that creates the big 'catholic' tent that brings together all the sects and factions on the basis of common ideology (Americanism) and the notion of co-belligerence. It can be rightly referred to as Christo-Americanism - representing neither the American ideals of the Founders or Christianity but a devious and deceitful tertium quid.

They've made a Faustian bargain and just as Tetzel hawking spiritual wares provoked a response, these agents of antichrist will do the same. But it's unlikely that they will produce a Magisterial Reformation - the conditions don't exist for that or any kind of return to Scripture. Rather they will provoke a revival of Liberal Christianity every bit as bankrupt and compromised as their movement is, a secular Christianity that will wither and die in a generation. In some quarters it will masquerade as Biblically based and Evangelical and so again we are faced with a choice between two false Evangelical movements, neither of which have much to do with New Testament Christianity. Try as they might and despite their claims the Confessionalist bodies are being shaped and affected by this as well.

For the faithful we are on the cusp of a new dark age that will call us to live not as established denominational Christians with buildings on the high street but as a kind of spiritual (and maybe actual) underground - functioning as a sect meeting in conventicles.

Right now that space is being filled by the worst kind of nationalists idolaters who promote not New Testament piety or ethics but political extremism, mythology, survivalism, and paramilitary violence.

If they win, it bodes ill for us. If they lose, regardless the churches will (and already are) falling into one grievous sphere or the other and the culture is going to become less and less friendly. And yet that doesn't concern me. Worshipping in basements and warehouses is really the norm for the faithful Church. My concern is for all the expressions of false Christianity which are multiplying - the Christo-American Right-wing factions as well as those who think the answer is found in re-rooting Evangelicalism in Classical Liberalism and Enlightenment thought. Both manipulate Scripture and turn it on its head. Both get some things right - but much more wrong and perilously so. One faction has effectively rejected the Constitution and the ideals of the Founders and the other attempts to argue they are Christian, in a manner reminiscent of politically conservative Christians from 40-50 years ago. Both groups are wrong. The Founders and the country they are created are not Christian but the who goal and ethos of power represented by the Dominionists (or Christian Nationalists as some would now have it) is also anti-Scripture.

The article was right to mark the distinction between the old grass roots democratic ethos of the Moral Majority (which was fatally flawed) and the top-down authoritarian style of the Dominionists and the umbrella of groups and ideologies that have now permutated and cross-pollinated within their movement.

As far as Ziklag, these are bunch of swindlers and political cretins that have abandoned Christ - even while they proclaim him. Their Christ is not the Christ of the New Testament but one of their own making.

The Marxist language is their weapon, their scare-tactic to frighten, anger, and whip up their base. There are no Marxists or even socialists within the American political spectrum - not even close. They were largely eradicated in the WWI era and the first Red Scare of the 1920's. Over the past century there have been groups, movements, and individuals that claim these labels but upon examination very few even meet the basic historical or ideological definitions.

It seems clear that a major goal of movements and organisations like Ziklag is to undermine and destroy elections. This has become all the more critical as they've realized that democratically-speaking they've lost the country. These debates have been going on since Obama won in 2008. They were put on the back-burner in 2016 as they thought they had a new avenue in the Right-wing candidate Trump - a kind of omnibus candidate that pulled from the extreme Right, the Christian Right, the Libertarians, and traditional conservatives who (though disgusted by Trump) felt there was no alternative. It was a short-lived hope and so now they're back to trying to manipulate elections and the courts play a crucial role in this - which involves data bases and AI. How many pastors will sell out their membership roles to these agents of chaos?

The critical moment that will define the 'conservative' Church's next generation will be when Trump is finally removed from the scene - which if he loses may not happen for awhile. He may run again in 2028. There's no telling. When Trump is finally and truly gone there will be a re-ordering, and a bit of reset, maybe even what could be called a reckoning. Maybe there will be some reflection or even some repentance but I doubt it. Like Trump, his followers seem to have abandoned all concepts of conscience or the capacity for shame.