The Ginni Thomas text messages to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, revealed in connection with the House investigation on the January 6 insurrection, have with good reason led to expressions of outrage in the media.  The messages not only showed Thomas’ support for the rioters, but indicated that she believes, like the rioters who prayed after invading the Capitol building, that the initiative had full divine approval.

Shortly after the riots, credible Christian leaders condemned the insurrection as the work of Christian nationalists whose views did not reflect the message of the Gospel of Christ.  In other words, Christian nationalism – See this article – is bad religion.  Today, reasonable people – people who respond to evidence as one would expect – across the political spectrum continue to see the January 6 event as an attack on American democracy based on a lie promoted by former president Trump and his supporters, and strongly question the wisdom expressed in the Ginni Thomas emails.  An example of such a response is the opinion written on March 31 by Frank Bruni in the New York Times.  Bruni, who is a professor of public policy at Duke University, writes:

“A week has gone by and I’m still aghast. Still astonished. Still absorbing what Ginni Thomas said in those text messages to Mark Meadows, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, as she urged him to overturn the 2020 election, and what she apparently believes in her poisoned mind.”

Bruni is particularly outraged by the fact that Thomas, who refers to Trump as “This Great President,” says to Meadows: “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice.”  She also accuses the “Left” of attempting “the greatest Heist of our History.”

Thomas accused the “Left” of doing what her side was on the verge of doing.  Bruni’s reaction to her preposterous claim is reproduced here almost in its entirety:

“She’s up in arms. She’s uppercase. And she’s emblematic: Her gratuitously capitalized words distill what makes political discussion today so difficult and why our democracy is indeed in danger.

‘This Great President.’ That’s no accidental pinkie — no clumsy thumb — on the shift key. Among today’s extreme partisans, who represent a frighteningly large slice of the electorate, a given president or politician is a commanding general in the battle of good versus evil. I mean Good versus Evil.

Restraint is retro. Hyperbole is the order of the day. Thus, ‘precipice’ is the new ‘edge,’ ‘Heist’ is the updated ‘scam,’ and ‘of our History’ is an essential qualifier, lest someone underestimate the threat and minimize the stakes.

There’s no entertaining the thought that a majority of your fellow Americans may not share your views. In an age of extreme narcissism, that’s unimaginable, impossible, phantasmagorical.

If the polls cast you in the minority, they’re wrong. If the vote runs contrary to your desires, it’s rigged. Or those fellow Americans just don’t matter, not like you do. You’re on the side of the angels. They’re trying to shepherd everyone into the abyss.”

Even though Bruni did not write from a religious perspective, he mentions “angels,” and acknowledges the belief by Thomas and Meadows that they are in a fight of “Good versus Evil.”  In the rest of this article, I will look at a religious response to the text messages by Michael Gerson.  I will also look at two perspectives offered to explain why people like Thomas tend to make statements that, to reasonable people, seem to defy common sense.  The bottom line is that bad religion tends to have a negative impact on a person’s perception of reality.

Thomas’ text messages reveal that she sees the “Left” as her main enemy.  Michael Gerson is not from the political left.  He is an evangelical, a Republican and a conservative who was a senior policy advisor with The Heritage Foundation and later became the head of the speechwriting team in the George W Bush administration.  Therefore, his comments on the Ginni Thomas text messages do not, by any stretch of the imagination, represent an endorsement of the “Left.”

In an opinion he published in the Washington Post on March 28, with the title What the Ginni Thomas text furor warns about an outsize role of faith in politics, he writes:

“Among the many disturbing revelations in the post-2020-election text-message correspondence between Virginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is their tone of religious certainty.”

Referring to specific details in the exchange between Thomas and Meadows, he adds:

“’This is a fight of good versus evil,’ wrote Meadows. ‘Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing.’ In another, Thomas threatens: ‘You guys fold, the evil just moves fast down underneath you all.’”

Gerson is clearly not impressed with the claim that Thomas and Meadows represent the forces of good in a fight against evil.  He explains:

“There is an air of absurdity in attributing a win to God only when Donald Trump is victorious. But Thomas and Meadows were deadly earnest. It is not enough to exercise power in their attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. Their efforts must be covered in a thick goo of spirituality. The conspirators believed they were doing God’s work. But really, they were attempting to make the Creator of the universe into a partisan hack who favored their (half-baked) political ambitions. In the process, they demonstrated the manifold dangers of the religious impulse in the public realm.”

Gerson sees hypocrisy in the attitudes of both Thomas and Meadows.  But he is even more disturbed by their suggestion that the situation warrants doing away with all rules.  He explains:

“In her texts with Meadows, however, we see a significantly different attitude toward democratic dissent. Thomas passed along a report that had circulated on right-wing websites that the ‘Biden crime family’ and ‘ballot fraud co-conspirators’ were being arrested and sent to barges floating off Guantánamo Bay for eventual judgment by military tribunals. ‘I hope this is true,’ she added.

It might be difficult to conduct rational debate above the din of waves near Gitmo. But given another sentiment Thomas passed along, it is probably not necessary. ‘The most important thing you can realize right now,’ the text read, ‘is that there are no rules in war.’ This was Thomas’s Christian contribution near the center of a political crisis fraught with threats of violence: ‘There are no rules.’”

Of course, the above insinuations against the “Biden crime family” are baseless conspiracy theories.  Thomas hopes they are true because that might provide a clear path to destroy Biden.  But from her perspective, truth itself does not even matter because there are no rules when there is a war.  Anything goes!  Is that what Christianity is reduced to?  The founder of the religion, Jesus, must have been completely unaware of this because he was urging his disciples to pray for those who persecuted them.

To Gerson, Thomas’ text messages show why people, including religious people like himself, “get disturbed by an outsize role of faith in politics.”  He then proposes lessons to be learned from this debate, which I reproduce here in their entirety:

• The Christianization of politics makes people in a democracy less persuadable. It is more difficult to question your cause if you regard it as a holy cause. And it becomes harder to see any glimmer of truth in your opponents’ views.
• A religious certainty on uncertain matters can blind people to difficult and complex debates. Look how conservative religion has encouraged, of all things, skepticism about vaccines. It is the deification of ignorance.
• Religious passion in politics can easily become tribal, as opponents are transformed into infidels. And this can provide an opening for racism and antisemitism.
• Religious passion can lower the standards to which we hold leaders, since the only real political choice is between a favorable strongman and the social abyss. This can reveal and encourage a dangerous authoritarian streak.
• Religious passion in politics can encourage an apocalyptic tone that drives out real deliberation. (To Thomas, we were seeing “the end of America… the end of Liberty.”)

Dana Milbank is a political commentator who also does not identify with the “Left” even though he has been highly critical of the Trump movement.  He has been criticized for seeing himself as “a truth-teller caught in the middle.”  Therefore, his reaction to the Thomas/Meadows text messages is worth discussing.  In an opinion published on March 28 in the Washington Post, Why do smart Republicans say stupid things, he writes:

“The Ginni Thomas text messages revive a question that has been nagging me since the dawn of the Trump era: What makes smart people say truly stupid things?

Thomas, wife of the longest-serving current Supreme Court justice, is no dope. She has a law degree, worked for House Majority Leader Dick Armey, served as the Heritage Foundation’s liaison to the George W. Bush White House and became an entrepreneur in right-wing advocacy. Yet in text messages to the White House chief of staff, she told him to “release the Kraken,” echoed a bonkers QAnon canard about ballot watermarks, and asserted the lunacy that ‘Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators’ were being arrested ‘& will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.’”

Milbank offers an answer to this conundrum:

“Surely a well-informed, well-educated person such as Thomas couldn’t actually believe the nutty ideas her thumbs texted?

But here’s the truly crazy thing: She probably does. Recent advances in cognitive science suggest that highly intelligent people are more susceptible to ‘identity-protective cognition,’ an unconscious process in which they use their intellect to justify rejecting facts inconsistent with their partisan identity.”

In other words, what we see as obvious self-deception is not necessarily the sign of an inferior intellect: smart people can be very good at embracing verifiably false perceptions of reality because of their prior beliefs or priorities.  Milbank lists various illustrations of this behavior from his own experience and from information he gathered from professionals who study such matters.  In particular, he describes a study conducted at Yale Law School:

“A highly regarded study by Yale Law School’s Dan Kahan and others explains how this happened. It tested people with math problems related to the effectiveness of gun bans in reducing crime. Those with higher numeracy skills were more likely to reach the correct answer — but only if it was ‘congenial to the subjects’ political outlooks.’ They were, in other words, using their intellects selectively, skipping the calculation when it appeared the answer would contradict their ‘cultural affiliation,’ explained Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychology professor who worked on the study.”

Milbank also comments on the severity of this problem in the current political environment:

“We all slip into such ‘motivated reasoning’ to some degree, but it has been a particular problem on the right in recent years, where a combination of the Fox News effect and the weaponization of disinformation by Republican leaders has left a large chunk of the population disbelieving the effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines and the reality of climate change but thinking that former president Barack Obama was born in Kenya and the 2020 election was stolen.”

It is interesting that the conclusions presented in Milbank’s article are similar in many respects to conclusions reached elsewhere in a study focusing on Christian nationalism.  According to this article, Samuel L. Perry, an associate professor of sociology and one of the authors of the study, first points to existing studies that report the performance of conservative Christians in tests on scientific facts:

“Research has consistently shown that conservative Christians tend to score lower on, say, brief science quizzes than other Americans. However, research also shows this isn’t necessarily because they’re less intelligent or even ignorant about what the ‘right’ answer is. Rather their response patterns suggest that they are answering particular scientific questions according to their theology.”

“’For example, conservative Christians don’t tend to score lower on science questions that are religiously uncontested, like questions about lasers, atoms, or viruses,’ explained Perry, the author of The Flag and the Cross. ‘But when you ask them about “the Big Bang” or “evolution” or even continental drift, they score lower because they reject the scientific consensus on those questions.’”

But the more recent study was focusing on the performance of Christian nationalists on testing associated with knowledge of American history.  Perry reportedly explains the results as follows:

“’We found that even after we accounted for Americans’ religious, political, and demographic characteristics, those who more strongly affirmed Christian nationalism were more likely to believe false things about religion’s place in American history,’ Perry told PsyPost. ‘They were more likely to believe, for example, that the US Constitution references our country’s obligations to God several times (it does not), that the First Amendment says Congress could make laws privileging Christianity (it does not), or that the Supreme Court made it illegal to pray or read your Bible in public schools (it did not).’

‘We also show this isn’t necessarily connected to lack of education or lack of confidence in one’s answers. In fact, we show that the more Americans affirm Christian nationalism, they’re more likely to give confident wrong answers. That suggests there’s something ideological going on here. Americans who believe Christianity should have a more central role in American society today tend to reinterpret history with that in mind.’”

I earlier defined “reasonable people” as people who respond to evidence as most people would expect.  Indeed, there has to be a common thread – reason – in the way individuals process facts if there is any hope for meaningful and useful debates.  The above discussion shows that many highly intelligent people do not meet that criterion because of their beliefs.  If those beliefs are religious, I see this phenomenon as the result of bad religion, as in the case of Christian nationalism.

The above discussion shows that those who misguidedly believe their causes have divine approval will often disregard the truth simply because the truth interferes with their agenda.  In the New Testament, it is reported that Jesus was often attacked by adversaries who accused him of healing the sick by the power of the devil, even though their own theology implied that such good things can only come from God (see for example Matthew 12:22-37 and John 9).  They were deliberately and knowingly suppressing the truth.

To Jesus, truth was so important that he made it a critical part of his teaching, telling his disciples: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32).  He also associated the suppression of truth with the devil, whom he described in John 8:44-45 as follows:

“He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Along the same line, Jesus also taught that knowledge comes with increased accountability: those who sin even though they know they are violating God’s will are to be held more accountable.  In Luke 12:47-48, we read the following:

“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Thomas and Meadows, in their text messages, claim that they are fighting for the King of Kings.  It seems to me that their obviously poor relationship with truth and their willingness to discard all rules are indications that the King of Kings will not recognize them as his “warriors” on this matter.