As we confront the installation of Trump back into the White House next week, thoughtful and caring Americans are having to load up on whatever means will be required to save the union and democracy through the next four years.

Taking into account all that has gone into the decades leading up to our present state of affairs, a lot of psychological and political factors can be identified. Fear, treachery, sociopathy, misogyny, ignorance, indifference, disinformation, brainwashing, sloth and just plain wrong-headedness have all been at play countering reasonableness, compassion, empathy, common sense and all the natural means by which human beings make sane and informed decisions in their self interest. Enough of the former, the bad stuff, has prevailed over the latter, the good stuff, over time to reach this point.

One of the most significant factors has been an amalgam of the bad stuff that arose since the 1970s that has been labelled “Christian nationalism.”

 My own theological education, the requisites for a Master of Divinity (M. Div.) degree from the accredited post-graduate Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. in 1969, has helped me to discern the rise of this movement, which involved the weaponization of old fashioned religious fundamentalism as a dangerous political phalanx.

From my point of view, this current is, by historic Christian standards, a serious heresy that was allowed to fester and grow because mainstream institutions failed to call it out and do battle against it. A modern day “live and let live” attitude within communities of faith deserves blame for this, for although secular social forces have readily taken issue with it, the world that embraces religious thought and language has had the duty to prevail against false teachings, against heresy, and it has not.

 Taking on heresies aggressively was how the fathers of Christianity shaped and built the institutions that carried western humanity through centuries following the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, to the point where invention of moveable type and the printing press put right teaching into the hands of the wider populace and made possible the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and scientifically-based Constitutional democracy.

Had a multitude of heresies not been taken head on in the first centuries of the early church, being countered with what had to be hammered out as the basis of a true universal faith, all the subsequent steps in the development of western man toward Constitutional democracy would not have been possible.

So did the likes of Clement, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen, Tertullian, John of Chrysodom, Jerome and Augustine do fierce moral and intellectual battle with Arianism, Gnosticism, Docetism, Donatism, Ebionites and Apollinariums and more over the course of centuries.

At the risk of oversimplification, the core issue at stake was a faith based on the real life and teachings of the real Jesus of Nazareth, such as found in the Sermon on the Mount and parables, as a model and ground for the ordering of humanity, on the one hand, versus false claims to authority by individual charlatans claiming special revelations and rituals grounded in superficial ephemera.

The adoption of the Nicene Creed in 325 AD, for example, involved a major dispute over the inclusion of what was termed “the filioque,” being the phrase “and the Son,” in the creed. Without that phrase, the door would have been opened to any false preacher to claim direct access to God by way of the Holy Spirit, alone, as many heretics, indeed, did. But by adding “and the Son,” that is, reference to the concrete, historical figure of Jesus, to the equation, the access to God the Father comes by way not just of any preacher’s “revelations,” but by way of the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth.

It is from this critical clarification of the teaching of the early church that the doctrine of the Trinity was derived.

Today, the charlatans from those early days take the form of preachers who claim their preaching and selected phrases out of a book constitute truth instead of the teachings of the historical Jesus, and based on that, bend their institutions and followers to worship false gods of specific political leaders.