Tea Party leader calls for end of Methodist church

Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips, speaking from what appears to be the party room of a Mexican restaurant

One of the best/worst parts of being a member of Tea Party Nation are the daily* emails from founder Judson Phillips. Phillips is not a craftsmanlike writer, but he’s passionate. He’s not afraid to invoke Karl Marx, make broad statements about Muslims, or point out who and sometimes what hates America. But as a just-folks kind of guy, Phillips also lards his statements with the homey, personal touches of an Andy Rooney. Consider his reflection from last Sunday, which begins with this glimpse into his daily life: “When I was in Washington this past Friday, I walked by the United Methodist Building, next to the Russell Office Building.  The sign in front of the United Methodist Building said, ‘Pass the DREAM Act.'” Three hundred words later, he arrives at this conclusion: “For the few remaining patriots in the Methodist church, know what that church supports and then you should abandon the church, much like the Methodist church as abandoned American values and patriotism.” Where he goes in between is pretty exciting, too.

Phillips is more fun when you remember that he used to be a trial lawyer. I don’t know how many people hired him to try to get their apartment deposit back and are in Tennessee state prison at this very moment, but I am prepared to believe any number. Phillips is not a careful arguer. Consider the opening salvo of Sunday’s column, in which he lays the groundwork for his decision to end Methodism:

I grew up in the Methodist church.  I left as a teenager because the Methodist Church is little more than the first Church of Karl Marx. After all, what can you say about a church that considers Hillary Clinton to be a member in good standing? Today, the Methodist Church is little more than the “religious” arm of socialism.

This is not so much your classic “A –> B –> C ” argument as an “A –> F –> alien letter that has not been invented yet” argument. While one admires the principled objection to Marxism on which the teenage Judson Phillips based his religious decisions, it’s hard to discern precisely how he became aware of John Wesley’s socialist agenda. Hillary Clinton doesn’t count, since she was a teenager at the time, too.* We’ll have to consider Phillips’s evidence:

The Methodist church is pro-illegal immigration.  They have been in the bag for socialist health care, going as far as sending out emails to their membership “debunking” the myths of Obamacare. Say, where are the liberal complaints on the separation of church and state? I guess their outrage is selective.

I’ll leave it to you to yell at your own computer screen about the separation of church and state. In addition to noting in passing that “most poverty is caused by a lack of freedom and lack of a free enterprise system,” Phillips has gathered all the evidence he needs to call for the destruction of a 250 year-old religion with 70 million congregants: he saw a sign outside one of their buildings.

What’s awesome about this is that Judson Phillips is Tea Party Nation’s top guy. He vies only with the National Tea Party, the American Tea Party, the National Tea Party Coalition of Americans and Dick Armey’s second-smartest intern as the voice of the movement. And here he is, taking the national stage to tell his followers that “if you hate America, you have a great future in the Methodist church.”

I do not hate America, sir. I’m a little disappointed to hear that my grandmother has been making apple crisp for a communist subversive organization, but I am thrilled that the Tea Party Nation is captained by a man who could not pass a freshman composition class. It makes me feel like I don’t ever have to actually contend with these people. Of course, should the Tea Party become a dominant force in American politics, their inability to reason and arbitrary declarations of socialism will turn United States government into a blind child’s trip to the hammer factory. But even then, I’m sure they’ll listen to argument.

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4 Comments

  1. So, so good: “This is not so much your classic “A –> B –> C ” argument as an “A –> F –> alien letter that has not been invented yet” argument.”

  2. Oooh, that infuriates me! So the most important thing about being a Christian is being a Tea Party “patriot”? How about loving and serving others – where does that enter the equation? Jesus seemed to spend an awful lot of time doing those things and not so much meddling in politics. He also wasn’t fond of the rich, but we pretend he was only kidding.

    It’s disheartening how so many here in Texas are absolutely saturated in this American Christianity where some idealized (mythological) version of the Founding Fathers are somehow part of the Trinity and the Constitution is perhaps more important than the Bible – and of course you have to read the Bible from the perspective of 1950s polite Southern society.

    I was brought up Baptist and still am (though no longer Southern Baptist, thank God, and now leaning strongly towards becoming Episcopalian), and I encounter this thinking far too often. People are more interested in maintaining the status quo, bemoaning how the “bleeding-heart liberals” have gutted that wonderfully stratified society so few actually used to enjoy in the name of convincing us all people are worthy of our consideration, than they are actually thinking about what Christ did and taught.

    It’s all about power: the old-school whites feel it slipping out of their aging hands and they can’t bear it.

  3. Why in the world does the media keep giving this idiot air time. Phillips represents no one other than his own self absorbed narcissistic ego. The real tea party conservatives dispise everything about him. Judson, you are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgcusting. You are a fool, an ignoramus. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

    And what meaning do you expect your delusionary self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake.

    You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

    On a good day you’re a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

    You are a swine and a vulgar little maggot. A bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I bet you couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won’t go away.

    You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and than killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

    You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.

  4. Saw a fabulous FB status today: “I’ll put the Christ back in Christmas when you put the Christ back in Christian.”

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