Summary:
Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin has spoken of the need to “deprogram” some Republican House colleagues he described as acting like cult members, and singled out “white Christian nationalists" among those who participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol last year.
During a discussion at an April 21 event at Georgetown University in Washington DC titled “Truth and Trauma: The Trials of American Democracy and Personal Tragedy,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a humanist and a member of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, claimed that some Republican House members are “acting much more like members of a religious cult.”
According to Religion News Service, Raskin, above, said he has “literally been consulting de-programmers to try to figure out how to talk to them and how to pull them away.”
The lawmaker said de-programmers told him to be “as warm and affectionate and as personable as you can” to his colleagues to “make them remember what life was like before they got into the cult.”
But you have to be very emphatic about what the truth is and what facts are versus what is just derangement. I’ve told some of them—I’m like, ‘If you guys don’t get out of this, you’re going to be fit when it’s all over only to be selling incenseand flowers at Dulles Airport.’
Can you imagine being “warm and affectionate” to the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia lawmaker, conservative Christian, and conspiracy theorist?
I could mention dozens of others but Greene, above, directly targeted Raskin in January when he encouraged the House of Representatives to hold two of Donald Trump’s former allies in contempt of Congress.
Raskin’s reference to Christian nationalism, during the conference that lasted almost two hours, came in the wake of a report published in February by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, detailing the significant role the fusion of faith and politics played in the attack on the Capitol.
Amanda Tyler, head of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which sponsored the report along with the FFRF, said that Christian nationalism was used “to bolster, justify and intensify the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”
Tyler’s group is behind an initiative called Christians Against Christian Nationalism.