<div class="p402_premium" readability="47">
                    <p>This whole approach is wrong on two counts.</p>                            <p>First, we are not a Christian nation. We are a nation founded on the principle of church-and-state separation, commonly phrased as “freedom of religion.” This means the government cannot impose (establish) a national religion, be it Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, or any other. Invoking Christian arguments for government policy is not only incorrect, it is a departure from or violation of the intentions of our Founders.</p>                            <p>The invocation of Christian principles in secular policy is wrong on a second count. We can all agree that one of the great woes of our current political landscape is extreme partisanship. We should reflect on the roots of this partisanship. In large part, it is due to the use of a good-versus-evil dichotomy in our political discourse. We are encouraged by cable news (read “Fox News”) to vilify, demonize, and fear our adversaries. We are told, directly or indirectly, that we do not just disagree with our adversaries, they are actually evil. Therefore, we cannot negotiate or compromise with them. This is religious thinking and religious language.</p>                            <p>In fact, our political disagreements are not, by and large, matters of good and evil. They are matters of emphasis. We all value family, security, prosperity, and a healthy environment. While some emphasize lower taxes and the decreased regulation of business, others emphasize compassion and support for the least fortunate of our fellows. These are matters of emphasis, not matters of good and evil.</p>    
    <div id="live-and-newsletter" class="p402_hide">

        <div id="newsletterSignup">

  </div>
</div>                        <p>We will do well to dispense with religious language and imagery in our political discourse.</p>                            <p><b>Charles Gessert</b></p>                            <p><b>Duluth</b></p>                                </div>

The civil components of the Lost Cause were combined with Christian mythology. The South played the part of Christ in the Christian drama — crucified, yet unrisen. The saints in this Lost Cause theology were the heroes of the Confederacy — most notably Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. A scholar of Southern religion, Paul Harvey, put it this way: “Key to this mythology was the exalting of southern war heroes as Christian evangelical gentlemen. Evangelists of the New South era immortalized the Christian heroism of the Confederate leaders and soldiers and dovetailed them into revivals of the era.” No matter one’s denominational affiliation, it offered a story and a set of high holy days every white Southerner could celebrate.

The Lost Cause is an example of how collective memory works. Collective memory is not concerned with historical accuracy; its preoccupation with the past is based on a desire to mobilize a vision for the present and create a prospect for the future. Heather Cox Richardson argues persuasively in her recent book “How the South Won the Civil War” that even though the Union defeated the Confederacy on the battlefield, the South won the war by creating a Southern identity that led to the emergence and re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the institution of Jim Crow laws, and then spread west to provide fuel for the Chinese Exclusion Act and acts of violence against Native Americans — all on the basis of resentment, myth and symbol, rather than facts or truth.

Make America Great Again is a politics of grievance complete with its own myths and symbols. Mr. Trump’s rallies have been the ritual locus of his brand of nationalism. They create a collective effervescence in attendees that leaves them seething at their political enemies and ready to follow the president down any authoritarian road he takes them. Moreover, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have shown that Mr. Trump’s religious support comes from Christian nationalists who believe the United States was built for and by white Christians.

Like the Lost Cause, MAGAism is buttressed by religious narratives and imagery, and its gospel is spread through houses of worship every Sunday. For some evangelicals, Mr. Trump is a divinely ordained savior uniquely able to save the nation from ruin at the hands of godless socialists, Black Lives Matter activists and antifa. So it’s no surprise that as insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, they waved a mix of Confederate, Christian and Trump flags.

MAGAism also has an eschatology based on conspiracy. As Marc-André Argentino, who studies QAnon, told me by email, for many Trump supporters, including growing numbers of white evangelicals, Jan. 6 figures as “the start of the long awaited period of tribulation that will announce the arrival of the promised golden age.” In other words, Jan. 6 is both a beginning point and a sign of the end, a rebirth for the dangerous delusions of extremists who see violence as an appropriate means for finishing what they started in order to usher in a new world.

The lasting legacy of the Jan. 6 insurrection is the myth and symbol of Mr. Trump’s lost cause. He has successfully nurtured a feeling in the 74 million Americans who voted for him that they can trust neither their government nor the electoral process. By encouraging them to question the validity of votes in some of the Blackest cities in the country, such as Detroit, and stoking anger that such constituencies would have the power to swing an election, he convinced them that the process is rigged, thus giving his supporters the moral high ground. This creates the foundation for a collective memory based on a separate national identity held together by the tragic stealing of his presidency and the evil of his opponents.

The Lost Cause provides a blueprint for winning the war, even though Mr. Trump has lost this election. After Mr. Biden’s inauguration, if prominent Republican figures encourage their followers to accept the results, but not defeat; if they pick up Mr. Trump’s leadership mantle by fostering resentment and the desire for revenge through their Twitter feeds; if they perpetually call into question the legitimacy of the U.S. government through an army of evangelical pastors less concerned with reality than with disseminating the myths and symbols of Make America Great Again as a vehicle for Christian nationalism, it’s not hard to see how they will become heirs of the Lost Cause. That should frighten us all.