Something we're all familiar with but not always aware transpired.

George Washington was fashioned as the Father. Lincoln as the son and savior. The American spirit of freedom and liberty as the Holy Ghost.

Christianity and Nationalism thrived.

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Art featured Lincoln being greeted in heaven by angels and Washington, taking the place of the Heavenly Father.

The longheld belief that America was God's ordained country grew by the day and our national mythology became its very own religion.

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The belief that America's racism and slaveholding past had been forgiven, that Lincoln's blood had washed us clean, did unbelievable damage.

It hid our very real and very present racism and all but forgave the Confederacy and white supremacists for their crimes.

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Reconstruction was hobbled by white supremacists following Lincoln but also by those who claimed the scourge had been destroyed. The Civil War, as a baptism of blood, meant the hard work of social progress and racial leveling wasn't necessary. It hid our racism.

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Something else happened though. The country being reunited without the reckoning meant that the dueling religions of the North and the South came together.

The virulent, white supremacist Confederate religion continued and grew in power and scope.

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As I've written about, Southern, Neo-Confederate preachers like Jerry Falwell continued the white supremacist religion of the Confederacy and brought it into the mainstream as an answer to Civil Rights.

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As Civil Rights preachers like MLK used Christianity to help their cause, Neo-Confederates preached that racism had been defeated by the Civil War and scrubbed clean by Lincoln's martyrdom.

It wasn't *necessary* for Civil Rights to be fought for. It was already done.

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The cornerstone of American white supremacy is to look at the Civil War and Lincoln's religious martyrdom and argue that there's no need for further reform, we'd been washed clean in blood.

It is religious/nationalist myth used as a means of oppression.

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Thus, when you hear Make America Great Again, it is a call to return America to a time before civil rights furthered us past the point of holy equilibrium, which was actually white supremacy girded by laws, a racist economy, and a religion helmed by racist God.

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The myth we are all submerged in, that of Washington as the Father, Lincoln as the Messiah, and Americanism as the Holy Spirit, this history as religion and national story, is a faith unto itself, but it is riddled with echoes of the Confederacy and blatant white supremacy

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Chances are there are churches this morning and this evening preaching a nationalistic sermon that mixes these elements together in order to keep their flocks from questioning the white supremacist order of the American present.

It is an incredible and dangerous weapon.

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These are the underpinnings and tenets of the Cult of the Shining City that I've written about in places like @newrepublic and have warned about. It is a Neo-Confederate cult that worships Donald Trump through the same nationalistic ideology.

26/ https://newrepublic.com/article/157062/trump-falwell-evangelicals-coronavirus

This is how we've gotten to this bizarre point, the merging of religious dogma, nationalistic myth, and the politicians and business leaders who knowingly use that toxic stew to manipulate people.

We have to reexamine ourselves and our history if we're ever to escape.

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