K.C. Boyd, author of 'Being Christian,' interviewed by Nicole Sandler last year.

"Elmer Gantry" is one of my favorite movies -- and the Sinclair Lewis book on which it's based is pretty damned good, too. So a friend recently referred this book, "Being Christian." He said it was written by a woman who'd done a lot of research into the Dominionists (who are one of the biggest threats to our democracy and have always fascinated me because of their conviction that it's perfectly okay to lie, cheat and steal, as long as you're doing it to bring God's kingdom on earth), and wrote about it as a satire. I wasn't all that interested in reading it (if you saw my pile of unread books, you'd understand) -- until he sent me this blurb by Mikey Weinstein, who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation as a watchdog organization to protect religious freedom in the military, and of course has been the target of death threats (because the baby Jesus would want it that way). I just love Mikey Weinstein:

Having raced through K.C. Boyd's astonishing page-turner without being able to put it down, Being Christian – A Novel, I can say there is no fictional portrait of today’s evangelical right that I would recommend more highly. As it says on the back of the book, this is Elmer Gantry, but on mega-steroids.

The story, in its vivid portrayals—with attention to character and place - was emotional crack to me. From the first chapter, Boyd created a story so riveting that not only could I not put it down, but upon finishing it, I found myself, like an addict, craving more. Being Christian screams screenplay, if ever a book did. A totally emotional experience, by book's end, I was left drained as well as disturbed by the true-to-life portraiture of John Christian Hillcox, Boyd's main character. A man who all too closely resembles so many of today's religious con-men we’ve come to know from sexual and financial scandals too many to enumerate. Being Christian - A Novel is brilliant theater of the mind.

It ain't literature, but it's a real page turner. Boy, does she know these people and how they operate. (I saw parts of every wingnut preacher I know in this book.)

And if you want an easy way to catch up on exactly how the End Timers are perverting our democracy, this book is right up your alley.

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I know, you all are shaking your head and asking why this is on the top list of videos when Sarah Palin isn't running for President. At least, she's not "officially" running for President like the others, who are fiercely engaged in nattering with each other in far too many ridiculous televised debates.

The video begins to answer the question, as does this post by Dave Neiwert earlier this year, but here's the short version: Sarah Palin believes she has been called by God to be President of the United States. She believes God works in unconventional ways, and she is therefore not bound by conventional means.

Sarah Palin's fondest hope is that the Republican party will cry out to her to save them from the current crop of front-runners. This is already surfacing a bit in Iowa, where her supporters are mounting a campaign to show up at the caucuses and "vote rogue."

Here's the ad:

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As Debt Ceiling Theatre begins an new week, we may well find this installment beginning with Asian markets crawling in the tank as further evidence of how far our treasonous right wing politicians are willing to go in order to serve their hedge fund managing Wall Street overlords.

But as a prologue, we had John Boehner yet again prove his unseriousness by proposing a 2-tier solution with a "serious" face. Because he hasn't already tried this before, don't you know? Boehner proposed to Pelosi and Reid a plan to raise the debt ceiling through 2011, with a second raise in the beginning of 2012. Because somehow in his whiskey-addled brain, Boehner thinks Obama and the Democrats have somehow said they would be amenable to that? Opposite land is where Boehner is living.

Or maybe not. As Frank Schaeffer explains, much of the brinksmanship is also being driven by right-wing fundamentalists.

Theology is -- by nature -- not about reason but about faith. If God's will is to be served then so be it if America is plunged into chaos! This debt ceiling fiasco is just another chapter in the "culture" wars.

The extreme language of Evangelical/"pro-life" rebellion has now been repackaged in the debt ceiling showdown. It is the language of religion pitted against facts.

And the anti-government charge is being led by people who are either true believers, thus unable to reason, or people catering to the true believers so that they can remain in the good books of the Tea Party, which is nothing more than the Evangelical far right repackaged and renamed.

Well yes. In this regard he's not telling us anything we don't already know, except that I'm not sure I'd be so quick to wrap up the Tea Party as evangelicals only. It is an unholy alliance of evangelicals and agnostics whose religion is the Almighty Dollar.

But he goes on, and here's where it gets interesting:

A Willingness To Destroy America In Order To Save It

George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the "Manhattan Declaration" (like Kreeft before them) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from passing laws that did not comply with their religious "values" and/or to undermine those laws if they were enacted.

Here's the actual text of that section of the Manhattan Declaration:

Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God’s sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.

The rest of it, as you may know, is a structured list of the culture war issues: homosexuality, gay marriage, abortion, etc. But as Schaeffer points out, this particular section grants them (in their own minds) the moral authority to demand that the government be destroyed in order to save it from these terrible things. The debt ceiling is just their current lever, like the Affordable Care Act was, and like all of the ridiculous votes to defund Planned Parenthood were earlier this year.

As I consider the victims in Norway who were assassinated by a gunman with views quite similar to these, I am rapidly concluding that this is an ungovernable nation with these insane, irresponsible, dogma-guided people pretending to lead. It could be that the markets will agree with that, too, in which case we may all find ourselves locked in the curse of interesting times.

Sarah Jones at PoliticusUSA points out that Sarah Palin uses terms that sound vaguely religious but have very specific meanings to the dangerous cult of Dominionists (her use of the term "Restoration" for her bus tour is a good example):

I’ve been saying for a while now that the mainstream media doesn’t “get” Sarah Palin. Last week, when the astute Lawrence O’Donnell equated her with Trump, I understood his reasoning, but disagreed with the premise. Sarah Palin isn’t Donald Trump, and when she speaks of a “fire in her belly” she’s not using that term politically, but religiously. She means she has a fire of God in her belly to lead the country to Jesus. She means she is anointed to lead us.

She has a fire in her belly alright, but it’s not the fire of politics as the pundits know it.

Leah Burton, of “God’s Own Party” made the following Fire in the Belly video:

And it’s not just Sarah Palin. As Leah explains, “She is joined by many who share her biblical “call to service in the name of Jesus Christ” such as Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, and a whole host of frightening – albeit not as recognizable – theocratic politicians who are aggressively working to re-write our Constitution and anchor it in Old Testament Mosaic Law.”

The Dominionist politicians might use words that remind you of your own church, or your friends’ churches, but these are not mainline Christians. They seek Dominion over the government, and indeed over what they term the “seven mountains” of culture. Their goal is to return it to the earth to Jesus, and the US to biblical law.

[...] Welcome to the new game of politics, where religion plays the role the founders sought to protect us from, a state sponsored religion or an official state religion. The next time you laugh at Sarah Palin because you think she’s dumb, remember that it isn’t that she doesn’t believe in science, it’s that she doesn’t CARE about science. It is irrelevant to her, because the sooner the planet explodes, the sooner Jesus comes back. And when you’re done laughing at her, realize that there are many more, less charismatic Sarah Palins out there, like Governor Scott Walker, whose ability to inflict harm via his beliefs is quite real. And some of them will run for President as moderate Republicans.

Haven’t we seen this show before?