how can it be?

“ … The most damning hand of murder, tyranny, and oppression, supported and urged on and upheld by the influence of that spirit which hath so strongly riveted the creeds of the fathers, who have inherited lies, upon the hearts of the children, and filled the world with confusion, and has been growing stronger and stronger, and is now the very mainspring of all corruption, and the whole earth groans under the weight of its iniquity…. which dark and blackening deeds are enough to make hell itself shudder, and to stand aghast and pale, and the hands of the very devil to tremble and palsy” (DC 123.7, 10).

​Willfully ignoring Caligula’s clearly articulated intents, motives, and hatreds for all things Muslim, this week’s SCOTUS decision concerning Caligula’s Muslim ban is yet another abomination in a long list of recent SCOTUS abominations.
 
Of course, the decision is consistent with a familiar, oft-repeated American abomination. Notwithstanding Lady Liberty’s call for all the “huddled masses,” “wretched refuse,” and “homeless, tempest tossed,” we are an unwelcoming nation: Irish, Italian, Greek, Jew, Catholic. Latino, and Muslims; racist white America has decried the entrance and presence of them all—white Americans would have decried the entrance of Africans if they hadn’t brought them here and, like Egypt of old, enslaved them for their own personal and ethnic profit (It worked, too. America became great through its vile use of slave labor. Perhaps this is what Caligula means by “Make America Great Again.”)
 
It is no accident that one of the most virulent periods of American hateful bigotry came during our last Gilded Age of the late 19th, early 20th century. Such hate is not only about ethnic hatred and racist bigotry. It is equally the bastard child of avarice and greed. Americans are always as concerned to protect their personal idolatrous materialism as to protect their “religion”—oh, wait, their materialism is their religion.
 
Speaking of religion… God must certainly be a big fan of irony, for they abound.
 
How can it be that so many traditional “Christians,” and non-tradition “Christians,” such as Mormons, insensate to their own past experiences with religious bigotry—whether being used as lion meat in the circus or being driven out of Zion and into the deserts of Utah—continue to be Caligula’s most loyal crowd? Too many of these “Christians” stand at the forefront of America’s structural and systemic religious oppression of Muslims. Like ancient Israelites before them, they have not remembered that they too were once hated, oppressed, and enslaved. They have forgotten that they are called to resist oppression and to never, never do to others what others have done to them.
 
How can it be that so many Mormons stand, politically speaking, shoulder to shoulder with an American “Christianity” that was, in Mormonism’s very first revelation, already condemned as an abomination? They will, no doubt, rejoice with the emperor and their “Christian” brethren from the “Christian Wrong Wing” when yet another supreme court jurist is ensconced to further carry out the mad and violent oppression that flows through the American legal system. What makes such Mormons think that American “Christianity,” whose doctrines are an abomination before God, are any better in their views of social policy and politics today than they were in their theological and ethical principles then? No, this is a most unfortunate and dangerous alliance.
 
It is something beyond irony to understand that those same Mormons who throw their lot in with the abomination called “American Christianity,” and with Caligula’s unholy medieval-style crusade against Islam (and every other “Other), will almost certainly be the next victim of the “Christian Wrong Wing.” For even though so many Mormons seek so desperately to be “Christian” like unto all the other “Christians,” their “Christian” allies will announce them heretics, just as they did the first generations of Mormons. Insensate to their past, too many Mormons are blind to their future.
 
Finally, how ironic that SCOTUS should uphold Caligula’s crusade against Muslims, and that the Emperor should continue his blasphemous war on immigrant families just as the nation hypocritically celebrates its “Independence Day.” It is all almost too much to take in. How can it all be? It is all, sadly, too ironic.

​“Verily, verily, I say unto you, darkness covereth the earth, and gross darkness the minds of the people, and all flesh has become corrupt before my face. Behold, vengeance cometh speedily upon the inhabitants of the earth, a day of wrath, a day of burning, a day of desolation, of weeping, of mourning, and of lamentation; and as a whirlwind it shall come upon all the face of the earth, saith the Lord. And upon my house shall it begin [is the “it,” “darkness” or “desolation”?], and from my house shall it go forth, saith the Lord; first among those among you, saith the Lord, who have professed to know my name and have not known me, and have blasphemed against me in the midst of my house, saith the Lord” (DC 112.23-26).