It’s not like we haven’t been here before with the Convenient Christian David French, lifting his eyebrow and expressing his horror over the more passionately demonstrative members of his claimed brethren. However, in his latest broadside, French asserts certain Christians (and Trump) are threats to America.

This is a grievous and dangerous time for American Christianity. The frenzy and the fury of the post-election period has laid bare the sheer idolatry and fanaticism of Christian Trumpism. (snip)

There is no other way to say this. A significant movement of American Christians—encouraged by the president himself—is now directly threatening the rule of law, the Constitution, and the peace and unity of the American republic.

French has been freaked out by the literally peaceful marches in D.C. yesterday. He links this video in his column and prefaces it:

Listen to the words. Feel the fury. Look at the men behind the preacher with the rifle images on their shirt, and ask yourself, is this not dangerous?

74 million people voted for more of this utter lunacy pic.twitter.com/5DZBYmKS1c

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 12, 2020

In spite of the fact that French has a multi-ethnic family (and he will frequently remind you of that) I wonder if he’s ever set foot in any Black Church. And a t-shirt with a rifle on it is … what? Somehow an unacceptable provocation where the ubiquitous Che/Marx/Mao/Sycle-and-hammer t-shirts are not?

And that’s where I think French went off the deep end. After years of cocktail party conservatism and doing some honorable work on religious freedom issues, he lost himself into a political mode of thinking that has been dubbed “David French-ism”.

Such talk—of politics as war and enmity—is thoroughly alien to French, I think, because he believes that the institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side. Even if the latter—that is, the libertine and the pagan—predominate in elite institutions, French figures, then at least the former, traditional Christians, should be granted spaces in which to practice and preach what they sincerely believe.

Well, it doesn’t work out that way, and it hasn’t been working out that way for a long time—as French well knows,

David is so enamored of the secular Leftwing elite life-style, he calls himself a libertarian as an excuse to allow them to dominate. As long as he has a toe-hold in media, is still friends with inside-the-beltway power brokers, he’ll not only shrug off the increasing demands of submission to the Leftwing orthodoxy but actively shove dissenters down the stairs.

David isn’t so much an observant Christian as he is as as “Hellenized” as were a faction of Jews in 165 BCE when the Maccabees had had enough and revolted against assimilation – what is celebrated today as Hanukkah.

When Ptolemy took Jerusalem, he did so cruelly, enslaving many. When the Selucid king Antiochus took it from the Ptolemaic Empire, he was crueler still to the holy city. Even so, there were Jews who were seduced by the politics and pleasures of the scions of Macedon. Hellenistic Jews vied for political power against the traditional Jews, and established Grecian institutions and acted out of disdain of Jewish customs. This faction welcomed Antiochus’ rule. This rule demanded submission of Jewish tradition to Hellenism; Grecian culture, philosophy, and religion. In the Jewish Temple an idol of Zeus was established and swine were sacrificed on the altar. Circumcision was banned under penalty of death for both mother and child. Sacred books were burned, their study forbidden. The Hellenistic Jews welcomed this new order, and helped perpetuate it.

French’s Hellenized Christianity enjoys being accepted by the cultural Left precisely because there is little to no Leftist cultural or political stance that won’t be embraced by one such “Christian” church or another.

But those icky Christians who preach in public? Who politely demur when told to bake the cake or affirm that trans women are women? The ones who don’t want to pay taxes to support Drag Queen Hour at the local library?

David views those kind of Christians with the same emotional reaction that New York City mayor DeBolshevik views religious Jews.

And French’s studied air of we must all get along and stop the conspiracy theories rings especially false given the years he put towards promoting the Russian collusion hoax and his rabid NeverTrumpism. Not once has he written about Antifa and only alluded to riots in Portland when he criticized Trump for even daring to send in security for a Federal building.

DavidFrenchism is why we got a President Trump because non-Hellenized Christians watched as a Progressive-run government and culture has actively sought to remove them (and religious Jews) from the public square. As Obama was wont to say “you have a freedom to worship” — alone, inside your head, let’s stop with this freedom to the free exercise of religion nonsense. If you have to sign a loyalty oath diversity and inclusion statement as a requirement of hiring, just do it. You don’t really have to believe it.

It’s not like your church has had to put a statue of Zeus behind the altar.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers!

featured image, cropped, by Gage Skidmore used per CC BY-SA 3.0 license.