Cecil B. DeMille, Trump, Southern US Barbarians and Louisiana’s Ten BS Commandments

Only excerpts of the SALON opinion below are posted here. Bold-underline is for emphasis. Italicized between brackets are Iznogood's inserts.

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SALON

Opinion

Ten Commandments gone wild! The Christian right's latest toxic distraction

Paul Rosenberg

Sun, July 7, 2024

“I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS,” trumpeted Donald Trump on his Twitter knockoff site, in the wake of the passage of a widely-reported new law in Louisiana. Trump wasn’t exactly lying, for once, as he went on to explain: It was all about the branding. The commandments should be displayed, he wrote, “IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”

Actual history tells a very different story, perhaps most comprehensively articulated by Andrew L. Seidel in his 2019 book “The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American” … He provides a detailed examination of how and why biblical principles are fundamentally at odds with our constitutional order. It may sound simplistic to contrast a country built on rebellion with a book built on obedience, but in fact, Seidel argues, that's exactly right. “America's justice system demands proof of guilt to avoid punishing innocence," he writes, but "the Judaeo-Christian god intentionally harms innocents to punish the guilty.”

… Seidel [says]:

Louisiana's Ten Commandments lawsuit actually disproves the Christian nationalist claim that the Ten Commandments are the basis of America's moral foundation. … Louisiana lawmakers edited and abridged the biblical commandments to “improve” the Word of God, to make them more moral. Gone is the reference to a jealous God punishing innocent children for the crimes of their parents (Exodus 20:5); the crime of exercising their right to freely worship. Lawmakers used our modern morality to edit the word of their God.

…

… "apostle" Lance Wallnau, whose book “God’s Chaos Candidate” compared Trump to the Persian King Cyrus, a "heathen" instrument of God’s will. But now Trump openly compares himself to Jesus and his followers eat it up, while his flagrant violations of the Ten Commandments are shrugged off, at best. Pastors who preach on the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus told his followers to "turn the other cheek," are accused of pushing “liberal talking points.”

In short, Trump has helped catalyze a profound disorientation of Christianity, deep into gaslight territory. By comparison, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is just a garden-variety Republican liar. “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver,” he said on signing the bill. It's an obviously illogical claim — you could also start by not nominating a convicted criminal for president — that’s also ludicrous and false in several different ways.

If we turn to the actual Bible, Moses is better described as a law-taker, not a lawgiver. There was nothing original about his list of commandments (Egypt, Babylon and others were far ahead) ....

There are, in fact, three different versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible: two in Genesis and one in Deuteronomy. While the versions in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 are similar (but not identical), the commandments given to Moses on top of Mount Sinai and engraved on two stone tablets, as recounted in Exodus 34, is nothing like the list of crimes most people know.

….

I turned for guidance to biblical scholar André Gagné, the author of “American Evangelicals for Trump”, who pointed me toward a couple of clarifying overviews. "The Ten (or Eleven) Commandments" by Australian scholar Stephen D. Cook was particularly helpful. After quoting from Exodus 34, Cook observes: "This is definitely not the list of ten commandments which most people are familiar with, but it is the only list in Exodus which is actually called 'the ten commandments.'”

….

… first there’s the vexing problem of which form of the Ten Commandments should be forced onto schoolchildren. Presumably not the Exodus 34 version quoted above, but that hardly solves everything. Wikipedia even offers a chart showing how eight different faith traditions group and number the commandments.

….

… legislation passed by the Texas State Senate, using a version, as he later noted, that “doesn’t appear in any Bible that I know of," describing it as a "highly Christianized version" with "Judaic elements removed.” [Christian nationalists are virulent anti-semites]

Indeed, the Texas and Louisiana bills call for the exact same language, which happens to be the same used by Cecil B. DeMille to promote his 1956 Hollywood blockbuster "The Ten Commandments," the one with Charlton Heston as Moses.

Nine families with children in public schools have filed suit over the Louisiana law.

….

The Hollywood Commandments

Author Kevin Kruse recently posted an excerpt from his book “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America” [corporate = Hollywood] that lays out much of the story about Cecil B. DeMille's "Ten Commandments" and its links to the Fraternal Order of Eagles, one of the most white-bread examples of such groups. The whole thing is well worth reading, but three points are worth noting here.

Kruse chronicles an even broader plutocratic reshaping of public Christianity than the Stewart brothers example mentioned above. … there's the right-wing gloss of DeMille's entire project:

“The great clash between two beliefs is dramatized,” the director explained to the Los Angeles Times. “Rameses II represents the ruler governing only by his own whims and caprices, whereas Moses brought to the people a rule of life which was eternal and right because it came from the Supreme Being.” “It is the story of human freedom,” he told the Washington Post, “whether men are to be ruled by law or by the whims of dictators, whether they are to be free souls under God or whether they belong to the state.”

It's flat-out wrong to describe Egypt in the biblical era as a lawless land [But that is what the Zionist Jewish propaganda wants you to believe in order to present themselves as saviors of the moral world]. Basic laws had been in place in since the predynastic period, going back to about 6000 B.C. Ramses II ruled from 1279 to 1213 B.C., when such laws had been in place for thousands of years. [In fact, the monotheism of the Hebrews, and later of Christians and Muslims, which is falsely branded as some sort of advancement for humanity, was stolen from pharaonic Egypt. Every fictional garbage story in the Torah was copy-pasted from other civilizations.]

Sociologist Samuel Perry, co-author of “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States,” highlights the distinction between Christian nationalism as an ideology and as a strategy, and the important role of propagandistic distraction. Christian nationalism, he said, has two goals: “First and most obviously, it's used by politicians to signal to their base that they are culture warriors against leftism, Marxism, woke-ism, state-sponsored atheism or whatever bogeyman serves as the scariest threat to conservative white Americans."

Republican lawmakers "must always face what Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls the ‘conservative dilemma,’" Perry continued, meaning that they represent the economic elite's interests [which are based on Darwinian theory], but they need votes from people their own policies hurt, specifically working-class white people. [Conservatives generally adhere to Darwinian theory in economic practice, but disapprove of it as against religion]   So distraction becomes a crucial tactic:

They point to immigrants, seculars, Muslims, the woke, etc., and tell working-class white people, "Those people are taking your jobs and ruining our economy and making you feel unsafe." Christian nationalist rhetoric and symbolic legal victories (like Ten Commandments legislation) helps in this regard, because politicians can talk about how they're fighting for our Christian heritage and values and those woke leftists are going nuts because they hate America and God.

As Perry noted on Bluesky, US News recently ranked Louisiana dead last among all 50 states, and number 47 in education. "That's why you pass laws to post Ten Commandments. Distract from your failures & make it look like you're scoring victories somewhere."

Perry himself lives in Oklahoma, another deep-red state that ranks “among the worst states on most indicators of well-being, including the economy, infrastructure, crime, health and, importantly, education." States like Louisiana and Oklahoma have been "led by Republican lawmakers for years, many of whom have no interest in actually improving public education, but instead replacing it with private schools and home schooling. So passing laws mandating the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms gives the impression that 1) the politician is scoring political victories for their constituents and 2) they're taking steps to fix public schools by starting with cultural repair.”

Dr. Barbara Forrest, who played a key role in discrediting intelligent design in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, has long been involved in such battles in Louisiana, her home state. She has previously argued that Gene Mills, who helped write the Louisiana law, "has made our state an incubator for political strategies designed ultimately to transform the United States into a dominionist theocracy, making Louisiana a cautionary tale not only for its own citizens but for the rest of the country."

…

Both the logic of distraction and the organizing behind it applies just as well nationwide as it does in the Bible belt. Donald Trump functioned as a distraction from past Republican failures, and now that he’s got his own massive failures — the worst COVID record in the developed world, the worst job record since Herbert Hoover, massive criminality and corruption — he badly needs the distractions Christian nationalism can offer, and the support of committed activists like Mills.

At its heart, the Christian nationalist agenda is very close to authoritarianism or fascism: America is a Christian nation, and Christians (of the right variety) should control every facet of it…. So despite Cecil B. DeMille's claim, this kind of Christianity can be a facilitator of tyranny. Trump seems to understand that clearly enough.