Courtesy Right Wing Watch:
Presidential spiritual adviser Paula White is currently leading an impassioned prayer service in an effort to secure Trump's reelection. pic.twitter.com/hCSRh84d6g
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 5, 2020
She’s quite the con man, isn’t she? She takes her audience out of the rational zone by pounding on their ears in order to deactivate any thinking, a well known practice, and invites them into group emotional response that suggests they are the Chosen, and, well, it actually makes me a little nauseous just thinking about it. And there’s a lot of people far better qualified to analyze the deceptive, manipulative qualities of her presentation, so if you want more operational analysis, I suggest you seek them out.
But I’m not here to poke fun at her – she’s actually a consummate professional, from what I can see, in the hallowed profession of grifter – or at her audience, or to pity the latter, or even to predict her comeuppance if Trump does lose the election, as appears to be happening this afternoon. In the magical realm of evangelical Christianity, she’ll blame it on Satan, whip the crowd into a frenzy, and suck some more cash out of them in the name of defeating Joe Biden’s – or his supposed puppet-masters’ – agenda.
No, my question is this – how do you rescue her congregation? When I said magical realm, I wasn’t joking. Religion & divinity, by its very nature, breaks the laws of nature and of logic; that’s how you identify a divinity. That magical realm, where ordinary common sense and logic are ignored in favor of whatever it takes to keep the emotional self happy, makes it very difficult to come up with effective arguments for the dissuasion of followers from their path.
Only when something like a plague impacts the followers will doubts be raised, or when another power-hungry cleric begins efforts to poach members.
So, OK, Biden may have won. That doesn’t have much impact on an evangelical movement bent on following its magical thinking that tells them that they’re OK just as they are, rather than invest in the hard work of rationality and self-improvement. Will we simply have to wait for the evangelical demographics to thin the ranks? Younger generations, by and large, are reportedly repelled by the White Evangelical antics of late.
Or is there some way to pry them lose from the spiritual cocaine that Paula White and her colleagues offer?
