Someone should alert Donald Trump that the ethos of People of Praise, the Christian group which counts his newest Supreme Court nominee as a member, bears an uncanny resemblance to the core principles of communism. Maybe then he'd think twice about constantly and ridiculously hurling the Socialist/Marxist epithet at the corporate Democrats in an effort to deflect attention from their mutual capitalistic agenda. Who knows? He could even end up withdrawing Coney Barrett's name from nomination. People of Praise does not, for example, embrace the odious Prosperity Gospel beloved of GOP cultists, who count greed not only as a Christian virtue but as an addendum to the original Ten Commandments.
Somebody should also alert the media conglomerate about this oversight so they may start calling Trump out on it. In an alternate universe, it might even reach the point that the capitalist class accused Trump and his nominee of both heresy and hypocrisy for ignoring the fact that Coney Barrett's group solidly adheres to the original socialistic radicalism of Jesus even as she herself professes public fealty to the Pantheon of Constitutional Originalists. This dual belief system simply does not compute.
Of course, I jest. Because the Narrative chosen by the liberal press is that People of Praise is a scary, "secretive" cult that directly inspired Margaret Atwood's dystopian The Handmaid's Tale novel about forced fecundity in a misogynistic theocratic American society. That neither of these things is true doesn't seem to matter.
Interviews with experts who have studied charismatic Christian groups such as People of Praise, and with former members of the group, plus a review of the group’s own literature, reveal an organization that appears to dominate some members’ everyday lives, in which so-called “heads” – or spiritual advisers – make big life decisions, and in which members are expected to financially support one another. Married women – such as Barrett – count their husbands as their “heads” and all members are expected to donate 5% of their income to the organization.
The group emerged out of the Catholic charismatic movement of the late 1960s, which blended Catholicism and Protestant Pentecostalism – Catholics and Protestants are both members – and adopted practices like speaking in tongues. The group’s literature shows communal living is also encouraged, at least among unmarried members, as is the sharing of finances between households.
The People of Praise website states that "We admire the first Christians who were led by the Holy Spirit to form a community. Those early believers put their lives and their possessions in common, and there were no needy persons among them."
Now, compare that redistributionist radicalism to the old-school secular communism that once thrived right here in the Land of the Free.
In Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism, one former leader explains how the party was organized in his poor Depression-era New York City neighborhood:
As for the individual Communist at the branch level, four-fifths of the time he followed Party directives, one-fifth of the time he was on his own; on his own he was supposed to respond to whatever happened in the course of a day in the neighborhood... "if there was a tenant conviction, or a sick comrade, or if he was needed to join a picket line, or canvas during an election. Or if the neighborhood needed a traffic light, or a shopkeeper was having trouble with the Fire Department. You know, just like the neighborhood Democratic Party would have operated - only we always got there first."
The branch members' other duties consisted of contributing a week's wages to the Party once a year, selling the Daily Worker and running off weekly leaflets.
People of Praise is religious, Communism is traditionally secular. Both embrace the spirit of community and both also have operated under varying degrees of rigidity and control, as do most organizations.
Amy Coney Barrett said that she admires the life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I hope that at her confirmation hearing she is also asked about the life and legacy of fellow Catholic lay-person and anarchist Dorothy Day, who herself had undergone an abortion before converting to the Catholic faith and spending her life in social activism and constantly "pricking the consciences" of the Establishment regarding war, inequality, and labor rights. I hope, that in light of the fact that Coney Barrett has previously vowed for religious reasons to recuse herself in capital punishment cases, that she will also have enough of a conscience to recuse herself in Supreme Court cases concerning contraception and Roe v Wade.
But her history of siding with corporations and oligarchs over the needs of ordinary people is troubling, to say the least. She's like Mitt Romney, a devout Mormon, in that regard. He also tithes and generously helps members of his own insular community in tandem with getting rich, through private equity, by indebting businesses before destroying them and insisting that godless "corporations are people, my friend."
It is the fine art of holding two opposing ethical positions in one's mind at the same time, and thus being able to sleep well at night. Trump will also easily cancel out every kind of conservative hypocrisy whenever it suits him, just so long as it serves the purpose of shielding his own.
But it doesn't hurt to try to rattle their rigid, complacent, carefully compartmentalized little brains every once in a while, does it?
And we must always have faith. If you do happen to pray, then you might beseech the almighty to allow Amy Coney Barrett to follow in the footsteps of Reagan appointee Sandra Day O'Connor, who at a relatively young age resigned from the nation's highest court in order to care for her sick husband. It was the ethical thing to do.
Of course, since she was succeeded by the arch-conservative Samuel Alito in the Bush Jr. administration, we should also always be very careful about what we pray and wish for.
