Tag Archives: christianity

The American Pastors Supporting Genocide

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Last week over a 1000 American pastors, mostly white, mostly men, and mostly evangelical, flew to Israel for a summit. It wasn’t to address the suffering of Palestinian children or to assist Palestinian families. It wasn’t to demand an end to the genocide. It wasn’t even to pray for a just peace for all peoples. It was a training program for Israeli propaganda.

Mike Huckabee, the Trump regime’s ambassador to the genocidal state and rabid Christian Zionist, joined the group. He said: “It’s an extraordinary time for pastors to go to their pulpits and push back on the bigotry being pushed toward Israel.”

Notice that Huckabee didn’t say bigotry against Jews. He said bigotry against Israel. Against a state. A state which is actively committing genocide with the full support of the United States.

This is significant because Christian Zionists are notoriously antisemitic. They do not support Israel because they love Jews, whom they believe are destined for hell if they continue to refuse their evangelical message of salvation. They do it because it fits neatly into their narrow, misinformed and heavily biased interpretation of the ramblings of a man who lived in a cave on a Greek island years after Christ walked the earth.

American evangelicals see Jews as essential only insofar as their role in the fulfillment of an eschatological opera. But they don’t see Palestinian Christians at all. They are rendered invisible because to acknowledge them would mean admitting the deep racism at the heart of their theology.

Benjamin Netanyahu, a man with an arrest warrant on him for war crimes, also addressed the crowd saying: “I’m counting on you. I know you’ll do what has to be done.” He also told them he wanted them to recruit 10,000 more pastors.

There is something deeply perverse about a group of Christian men being flown into a nation which is committing the very worst crime against humanity, only to “learn” from the very criminals perpetrating it. And doing this all while ignoring the mass suffering occurring just a few kilometres away. Not one of those pastors visited a Palestinian church or even mentioned Israel’s bombing of churches in Gaza.

That this happened during Advent is also staggering. This is a time when Christians around the world meditate on the story of a refugee child hunted by a vicious genocidal king. But instead of attending to the suffering of children being slaughtered by a contemporary genocidal government, they basked in its comfort and vowed to defend it.

To be sure, this is the heart of American Christianity. And it is a cold, deadened one. A theology of death. A gospel of calculated cruelty. And nothing will awaken these dead bones from the white washed sepulchers they have chosen to repose in.

*photo is from the “summit.”

Kenn Orfanos, December 2025

The White-Washed Sepulchers of America

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Nikalie Monroe did a social test which she posted on TikTok. She called dozens of churches across the United States pretending to be a mother in desperate need of baby formula. Sometimes she would play a recording of a crying baby in the background. She would say she had no money and that the baby hadn’t eaten several meals.

Despite all this, most of the institutions, that incidentally boasted they were “prolife,” refused to help her, citing such reasons as “You don’t attend the church,” “We stopped doing that,” suggesting she contact “local government,” or simply saying “no.”

It was the smaller, predominantly Black churches, a Buddhist Temple, and several mosques and Islamic Centre’s that assured her that they would help. One pastor, an elderly grandfather, said he would go out and buy the formula himself. Others, including the late Charlie Kirk’s church or the toothy charlatan Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, turned her down. Osteen”s estimated net worth is anywhere from $40 million to $100 million.

And did these churches apologize for their stunning hypocrisy? Or for their glaring lack of compassion and care for a starving baby? Well, no. In fact, the pastor of the Living Faith Baton Rouge Baptist Church said he “doesn’t apologize to Satan.” He then called Monroe a “evil witch” and that his bible didn’t allow such people “to live.” The pastor of Germantown Baptist Church in Kentucky accused Monroe of being a woman of “folly, seductive and knowing nothing” who was trying to catch the church in some “woke liberal” trap.

American Christianity was poisoned a very long time ago by capitalism. The ones who gulped down most of that brew were white, evangelical churches. This is where the noxious “prosperity gospel” was born, which elevated wealth to a virtue and that celebrates slick televangelists who sport gold watches and climb aboard private jets. The one that blames the poor for their plight because they didn’t pray hard enough, they weren’t “trusting Jesus,” or because they didn’t tithe enough money to be blessed. The ones who delight in raining fire and brimstone down on the vulnerable and marginalized in society, yet seldom, if ever, preach about Jesus warnings to the wealthy.

That these churches are prolife is of little surprise. Their piety is policy, not compassion. And that policy is about social control and oppression, not enlightenment or liberation. This is how they have absolutely no problem with Israel’s starvation of babies and children in Gaza or even the suffering of Palestinian Christians.

These Christians delight in punishment and otherizing because, like the early American Puritans, their twisted sense of sanctified beatification is a source of sadistic pleasure. There is no mystery that they deify nakedly cruel despots like Donald Trump either. He echoes their hollowed out humanity. A narcissistic bully who revels in punching down on who Jesus referred to as “the least of these.”

Nikalie Monroe’s little social experiment held up a mirror, and these churches had to look at themselves for one, long, uncomfortable minute. But it isn’t really shocking that they lack any capacity for insight. The poison they drank years ago deadened whatever soul they once had. The tragic irony is that they could not see they were the very “white-washed sepulchers” that Jesus once warned about.

Kenn Orfanos, November 2025

Held Hostage by a Death Cult

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I was thinking about the latest “rapture” craze on social media. And I remembered learning about it growing up. I went to a conservative protestant church, and later to a conservative Christian college. So, I am quite familiar with the concept.

When I began deconstructing my faith I learned that the word “rapture” isn’t even in Biblical scripture, In fact, the idea first emerged in 1830s America. And while it is popular in fundamentalist or evangelical circles, most Christian denominations reject the doctrine completely.

Regardless of that, I have been reflecting on the despair that buttresses such a theology. How sad that there are so many who would rather be whisked away into the sky to some imagined paradise, rather than stay here and fight for this world to be livable, just, egalitarian and kind. And how very misanthropic. This doesn’t appear like spiritual practice, it strikes me as spiritual abuse.

Not only does this idea of “rapture” delight in leaving earth and billions of human beings to perish or suffer unimaginably. War? Genocide? Destruction of the biosphere? It sees it all as necessary to the story. There is only one ending to this tale. Only one conclusion. And that is for its apocalyptic “prophecies” to be fulfilled. Whether or not that will come about by the Divine or his followers is the sticky part.

If this was a religious belief that did not grievously affect virtually everything about our future as a species, it would not matter. But now that evangelical Christian fanatics are firmly in power in the United States, the wealthiest and most powerful military empire in human history, it matters to everyone.

So, while we may laugh at such ideas or pity those bamboozled by them, maybe it is time we acknowledge that we are all being held hostage by an unhinged death cult. And their sole intent is to rise into the heavens while reducing this world, our only home, to a pile of ash.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025

Mike Huckabee and the Evangelical Cult of Death

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How do we make sense of US Ambassador Mike Huckabee’s fervent support for Israeli genocide? How do we grapple with a man so devoid of compassion, reason and basic human decency that he would cleave to the most murderous and racist elements of Israeli society? Well, we have to understand the evangelical Christian culture he emerged from.

I am familiar with this culture. I grew up in it, although I would classify my parents as Jimmy and Rosalind Carter kind of Christians. They were people of faith, but it guided them to be fair, kind and loving. They took the best parts of Christ’s message, the beatitudes, and they tried their best to live by them.

Others I knew weren’t so enlightened. Their puritanical sensibilities drove them to judge everyone but themselves. They invented a god that took great pleasure in causing ordinary people enormous suffering. They conjured demons everywhere to explain why anyone would dare disagree with their spiritual or worldview. And they were drunk on the notion of vengeance and in destroying a world they viewed as irredeemably wicked.

Huckabee comes from such a culture. He views the world through an eschatological prism where Christ is chomping at the bit to return to a lost and devastated earth. One where only people of his particular faith and denomination are saved. Where the return of Jesus is heralded by the destruction of God’s “enemies.” And those enemies, not by coincidence, happen to be the same ones of the American Empire. It isn’t a stretch to think that Huckabee believes he is an instrument of this fantastical “End Times” plan. That he sees himself as a “vessel of the Lord.”

I knew men and women like Huckabee. I went to church with them, sat in their Sunday school classes, and was put on their prayer lists when I “backslid” in my faith. When I began to see through the veil of their supremacist theology I saw a group of terrified and willfully ignorant bullies. Ones who used their faith as a bludgeon against anyone who they deemed sinful, defiant or a heathen. Their racism, or homophobia, or misogyny, or Islamophobia, or anti-science beliefs became their god’s beliefs. Their narrow and culturally prescribed interpretation of Biblical stories and myths became the sacrosanct and inerrant “Word of God.” And anyone who had a different view was cast as being blinded by Satan.

When I was growing up, I saw many religious tracts penned by the infamous Jack Chick. He was a master at drawing human beings he disliked as grotesque caricatures with twisted faces and usually followed by ghoulish demons sitting on their shoulders. Looking at them now gives me a chuckle, but I remember the fear they instilled in me as a child. And I began to realize that this was the worldview of so many people around me. A cartoonish and deeply cynical understanding of the world and its people. A spirituality grounded not in love or understanding, but hatred and sadism. Devoid of curiosity and wonder and full of sanctimonious preachiness. Huckabee makes me think of those tracts. And his worldview seems to be like a page from one of their fear-laden issues on sin and wickedness.

It is the only thing that can explain how evangelical Christians can adore a man who, by their own definition, is sinful, full of pride and ungodly. One who delights in cruelty. Who has fornicated and committed adultery, both grave sins in their theology. But he is fulfilling their end time dreams. So, everything else can be overlooked or even forgiven.

It is the only thing that explains how they can stomach the burning, bombing and imposed starvation of millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of children. It is all part of God’s plan. The Jews must return to Israel for Christ to return. But it isn’t out of any kind of love for them. On the contrary, they believe that two-thirds of all the nation of Israel will be cut off and die. The rest will supposedly “come to the light” and accept the American evangelical version of the messiah as their lord and savior. The Palestinians, in their worldview and as Huckabee has stated publicly, simply do not exist.

Huckabee is in a cult of death. Scary in and of itself, but even more so because this cult is in charge of the most powerful empire in history. And its mission is to bring about the end of the world. In truth, we are all being held hostage by its unhinged and maniacal policies, machinations and plans. We can only hope that this cult is dissolved before it embraces a final solution for us all.

Kenn Orphan, 2025

The New Testament of Maga Christianity

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When constituents of US Iowa Senator, Joni Ernst, shouted their anger that cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would cause people to die, an impish smile stretched across her face. “Well, we are all going to die,” the senator responded.

People were stunned. A senator laughing at the certain deaths of human beings due to lack of food and healthcare? Due to the deliberate cutting of the very thing that keeps them alive? Laughing at the deaths of the elderly, disabled and children?

But the senator didn’t feel one bit of remorse. In fact, she doubled down on her stance, posting a video of her standing in a cemetery. In it, she sarcastically took aim at those who were outraged. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,” she said. And proceeded to proselytize to them about how accepting her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, would ensure everyone eternal life. Ironically, she said this after mocking her constituents for believing in the tooth fairy.

But was this out of character for the senator? After all, this is what she believes. This is Maga Christianity. It is the firm belief that the only respite you are entitled to in this life is in some afterlife you are sent to if you believe in their narrow, heavily curated and extremely exclusive version of spiritual salvation.

Maga Christianity, like the one espoused by Ernst, is not a new phenomenon. It is the natural evolution of American Christianity. One that was born out of the rationalization of Indigenous genocide, justification for the enslavement of Africans, the normalization of perpetual war, and a fanatical adoration of the predations of capitalism.

It is what enables them to overlook the cesspit of Donald Trump’s morals, trash the environment (after all, God is going to destroy it anyway), and support genocide in Gaza. The latter comes down to an eschatological worldview that requires the state of Israel to exist so that the second coming of Christ will be ushered in. Never mind the fact that this worldview posits the forced conversion or eternal condemnation of Jewish people. Never mind that it ignores the very existence of Palestinian Christians. Never mind that hundreds of thousands of people, including thousands of children, are being bombed, burned alive, and starved to death.

Their worldview demeans and diminishes life here. It ridicules suffering or says it is inevitable or necessary. Well, at least for those they deem subhuman or “sinners” or heathen. But for Maga Christians, their eternal reward begins here with unfettered access to power and wealth.

Ernst and her ilk will likely never come to see her faith as a bludgeon. She will likely never develop a real sense of empathy. And since empathy is rapidly being classified as a sin in the Maga religion, why would she?

To the rest of us, her callous cruelty and sadism will not be forgotten, nor forgiven. Her little joke at the expense of the ill, the disabled, children, elderly, impoverished and dying will forever be likened to the phrase “let them eat cake.” And we all know what happened to the person that was attributed to.

Kenn Orphan, June 2025

My Alma Mater is closing its doors, and that is a good thing

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Recently, I found out that my undergraduate alma mater is closing its doors forever. Over the past few weeks I’ve seen several social media posts from alums who seem heartbroken about it. At best, I have mixed feelings, but ultimately, I am not sad in the least.

For those who do not know, I went to Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) which was affiliated with the Nazarene denomination of protestant Christianity. It is a conservative church that had a somewhat rigid dogma and taught that dancing, going to movies, having pre-marital sex and drinking alcohol were sins and they were all forbidden activities at the college. Homosexuality was also considered a sin, although it was treated as a far more sinister thing than the others.

It may sound crazy to some that I chose to go to this kind of a school. But I went to a local Nazarene church for a few years when I was in high school and made several friends there. I was brought up in a Christian home with very loving parents, and I also considered myself a Christian. It was my experience and what I knew. So, choosing ENC wasn’t a stretch. And the fact that it was in Boston made it that much more appealing.

I attended and lived in its dormitories for four years where I had the privilege of learning from some truly terrific academics, especially my sociology professor. And I had the displeasure of being under the tutelage of some truly terrible ones, such as the head of the social work department who said that the only home she would never place a child in for foster care or adoption was one with LGBTQ+ parents. She wasn’t an outlier in her beliefs. It was part of the “holiness” culture to look down on others as not quite holy enough or as outright sinners.

I remember chatting with a guy on my dorm floor about homosexuality. When I asked him how he thought Jesus would react to a gay person, he said without hesitation that he would “turn his back on him”. I was aghast at the ease of his reply. That he found this one, so-called “sin” so much more revolting than the others. Pre-marital sex? Adultery? none of these elicited the same reaction.

At the annual Junior/Senior banquet I recall a slide show presentation of campus life put on by the seniors for the junior class, where a popular senior recounted a quip he made in philosophy class during a discussion of homosexuality. His “argument” in the debate, which he apparently found quite witty, was simply: “the anus is an exit, not an entrance”. The banquet hall erupted in laughter. This was the dehumanizing or degrading way that we were talked about, as sinister ghouls or the punchline of a crude joke.

It was at ENC where I went through one of the worst bouts of depression in my life. When I was in my freshman year I internalized the lie that I was an abomination, something heralded by the doctrine of the church. I prayed nightly for God to change me. He didn’t. And I almost didn’t survive that year.

The worst part of being at this very Christian school was that I had to hide who I was to virtually everyone, except some of my closest friends. And even with them, I was cautious. If anyone found out, I would either be expelled or be required to submit to some kind of horrid and abusive conversion “counseling” in order to remain there. This was the atmosphere of this supposedly loving place. One of isolation and fear.

But somehow in my time there I was elected president of the social work association, became co-editor of a poetry magazine, wrote editorials for the school newspaper that were most definitely considered radical or leftist, and I took part in several social justice actions against war, capitalism and environmental destruction. And this shy boy was able to delve into a love of acting and singing by joining the A Capella choir and several theatre productions of plays and musicals.

And in my senior year something changed in me spiritually and emotionally. I ceased caring about what people thought of my queerness. I took a job in Boston which thankfully got me off campus more and into an exciting city. I got my own dorm room, ditched the kitsch Christian posters and decorated it with art and more mature furnishings, bought fashionable clothes and started to feel more confident in my “worldly” worldview.

I also had my first intimate sexual experience at ENC in the privacy of my own room. It’s difficult to explain the thrill of doing something like that in defiance of an institution’s repressive rules, inhuman culture and banal medievalism. Of finally being able to be oneself. It was a beautiful experience that filled me with joy and that I revel in to this day.

After I graduated from ENC I went to a graduate school back in New York that was the polar opposite. I had professors who were bold in their social justice stances. There were no outdated paternalistic roles for genders. No one snooped into my private life or accused me of being a sinner or an abomination. And I could be completely out of the closet and celebrated for who I was. What a difference it made for the direction of my life.

As ENC closes its doors I find myself remembering those days. It’s not that I regret going there. After all, I made a lifelong friends. And I think it made me a stronger person. However I do often wonder how things might have been different for me. Would I have been able to become the person I am now much sooner? Would I have gained more confidence in myself than I do now? I’ll never know.

We are living in a time where the Queer community is under constant attack from reactionary elements in society. In the US, hundreds of laws are either on the books or are in the pipeline that blatantly discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. The rhetoric amongst conservative politicians and media personalities has become a cauldron of vicious lies and demonization. So, it is through this lens that I see ENC with a more critical eye.

ENC played a big part in shaping who I am today, but it is a chapter in my life I will gladly close forever.

Kenn Orphan, July 2024