Alabama Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville had a stark warning for the approximately 100 Utah GOP delegates who crowded into a Bluffdale warehouse to hear him speak on Friday afternoon: Malevolent supernatural forces are working to undermine America.
They certainly were not spared during the original exercise of fascism.
And I’ll go one point further and assert that the closer a single individual is to walking the tenets of classical Christianity – compassion, honesty, practicing ethical consideration in choosing personal acts, abhorring unnecessarily hurtful acts – not only will they NOT be spared, they will be among those most violently targeted, as soon as they become known to the persecutors.
Why? Because these are True Believers, and they are what real resistance is made of.
Regardless of the belief system underlying a True Believer, that’s what makes a True Believer tick: the belief itself. It doesn’t have to be Christianity, or even any specific religion; just their own belief system and their near-exclusive personal reliance upon it in daily life, and especially in times of crisis.
Nothing outside that belief system moves them in matters that are important to them, nor do they require external validation for their choices. That makes them impossible to control, hard to spot because they are not necessarily talkative or participative on social media, and frequently impossible to predict if you don’t know them personally.
So when that belief system involves a deep abhorrence of all things unnecessarily hurtful to others (or “evil” if you will), when they are the ones who actually decide to be that One Good Man in their current reality when they hear the old maxim “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” – classic Christianity, in a nutshell – they are deeply threatening to authoritarian governments and regimes that rely on manufacturing fear and the manipulation of personal belief to maintain control over individual citizens.