February 3, 2015

Republicans are starting their organizing efforts early. Please do not mistake plans for more giant prayer rallies like the one recently held for Bobby Jindal for anything close to legitimate religion or Christianity. It's not.

Tamara Scott is featured in the video above. She is an RNC committeewoman first and a political organizer second, with her own radio show and plenty of hyperbole.

Tamara Scott, an Iowa Religious Right organizer and RNC committeewoman who was involved in organizing Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s “The Response” prayer rally, said last week that a number of other Republican governors have committed to or are seriously considering holding similar rallies, which she hoped would save America from God’s destruction.

Let me translate that "God's destruction" reference. She hopes America will be saved from any more Democratic presidents. It's no secret that evangelicals stayed home in 2012 when Mitt Romney was the nominee, so Republicans are determined to promote a self-professed, God-fearing Christian.

They did this in 2007 for Huckabee, too. Different name, same sponsors. Donors abound, beginning with the Koch Machine and many, many other right wing donors like the Hobby Lobby Green Family.

Scott told the “View from a Pew” hosts that such events are needed to save American from destruction, paraphrasing the biblical book of Jeremiah: “If I build up your nation and you fall away, I’ll destroy you…If I’m going to destroy you and you repent, I will heal your land and rebuild you.”

“If our federal government is not smart enough to stick to the foundational principles of those who set this country on the great start that it had by calling on the name of Jesus — George Washington to all the men on Mount Rushmore — if they were not smart enough to understand, then our states can do it individually,” she said on the earlier program.

Listen carefully. Do you hear the sound of nullification rumbling under that comment? I think I see subtext peeping out from under the veil of "Christian nation" rhetoric.

Do not mistake this for anything actually resembling Christianity. This is a good old-fashioned tent revival, but the faith they're reviving is rooted in the Divine Church of Saint Ronald the Trickler, in their best Ralph Reed-Jack Abramoff tradition.

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